Washington Post
May 22, 2006

A conveyor belt from an American-built tower crane fell more than 60 feet onto a group of Chinese workers, killing three and injuring 30, the Chinese press reported.

Beijing – A conveyor belt from an American-built tower crane fell more than 60 feet onto a group of Chinese workers at the controversial Three Gorges Dam project, killing three and injuring 30, the Chinese press reported. News of the accident, which occurred Sunday night, marked the first time that China’s official press has reported fatalities associated with the project. The massive $24 billion enterprise–seeking to harness the Yangtze River in central China–has become politically sensitive, generating widespread criticism that it could endanger the environment, is displacing a million people and has been surrounded by official corruption. Reports from newspapers in the nearby city of Chongqing, 800 miles west of Shanghai, and from the semi-official China News Service said work on a section of the project has been halted and that officials from the State Council, the China National Power Corp. and Hubei province have rushed to the scene. Chinese media identified the machine as a tower crane produced by Rotec Industrial Inc., based in Elmhurst, Ill. Robert Oury, Rotec’s chief executive officer, said the machine involved in the accident is one of four combination crane and conveyor belt towers working on the dam, purchased from Rotec for more than $8 million. It has been on the site for 14 months, conveying and pouring concrete almost around the clock, he said in a telephone interview. Oury said that after a serious problem with a bearing, Chinese technicians took part of the machine to the ground to repair it. As they sought to reassemble the conveyor belt that rises up the structure, parts of it fell to the ground, hitting the workers, he said."We have never had a fatality with another crane," he said. "We need to figure out what happened and how to prevent it from happening again." The deaths are part of a growing list of problems for the dam, one of the world’s biggest engineering projects.