Quake-hit county to be rebuilt with high safety standards
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High safety standards will be applied to the reconstruction of a remote Chinese county which was struck by a 5.8-magnitude earthquake last week causing 25 deaths, local officials said Thursday.
The officials denied the claim that the use of hollow bricks -- a kind of bricks with perforations to allow passage of air -- was the top killer in the earthquake that jolted Yingjiang County, southwest China's Yunnan Province on March 10.
"The hollow bricks are nothing wrong. The problem is how to use it," said Yin Anqiang, a Yingjiang official in charge of housing and urban-rural development.
Villagers and civil engineering experts said rural families in Yingjiang widely replaced concrete bricks with hollow bricks to build walls, pigsties, kitchens and sometimes residence to save money. And many rural housing were not built according to the safety standards approved by the state.
Yin said the collapse of hollow brick structures was an alarm and the authorities would from now closely supervise the use of hollow bricks in the reconstruction.
In addition to injuring 314 more residents, the March 10 quake toppled 1,039 homes and seriously damaged 4,994 others, according to official statistics.
The local government on Thursday said work in the quake zone is about to enter the rebuilding phrase, as more than 100 million yuan (15.38 million U.S. dollars) in relief fund allocated by the state treasury has arrived.
