Kelly Haggart
June 20, 2002

Ten people were killed when a massive garbage mountain collapsed in urban Chongqing last week, burying them alive, the Chongqing Morning Post (Chongqing Chenbao) reported.

The Liangfengya dump in Shapingba district had been growing for more than a decade, the newspaper said in its June 16 report. The 100-metre-high mound, containing 400,000 cubic metres of residential and industrial rubbish, suddenly gave way at 10 p.m. on June 14. The ensuing landslide of garbage engulfed two factories and dislodged a workers’ dormitory, which was moved 10 metres by the force of the flow.

Four of the 14 people buried under the garbage were pulled to safety after 700 police and soldiers mounted a rescue operation, the newspaper said. The rescuers were able to reach four people who lived on the third storey of the dormitory, but could not save 10 others who lived on the lower floors.

The tragedy occurred shortly after the region’s biggest storm in a decade dumped 264 millimetres of rain on Chongqing in just 14 hours, the Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News (Yangcheng Wanbao) reported June 17.

The incident highlights concerns about similar garbage mountains in the area of the future Three Gorges reservoir. Chongqing municipality, at the tail end of the reservoir, is racing to clean up its heavily polluted section of the Yangtze River before the dam permanently slows the river’s flow next year, concentrating garbage and pollutants in the huge new body of water. According to a survey conducted by the local Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the 600-kilometre-long reservoir will flood 178 garbage dumps heaped with 2.8 million tonnes of rubbish, as well as 64 industrial sites containing 15 million tonnes of solid waste.