BEIJING (AP) – Chinese authorities detained 13 people over the collapse of scaffolding at a power plant construction site that killed 74 workers, as a preliminary investigation zeroed in on how the building company had rushed the job.
Most of the dead had been working on the interior concrete wall of a massive circular cooling tower 70 meters (230 feet) up when the scaffolding collapsed Thursday morning, resulting in one of China’s most serious industrial accidents in years.
In a statement issued Saturday, the committee of the State Council, or China’s cabinet, said early findings suggested that a shortened timeframe for the power plant project, hasty construction and mismanagement played a role in the disaster, without giving details.
Although authorities did not disclose details about the 13 detentions, the focus of the investigation has turned to the power plant’s operator, Jiangxi Ganneng, and a major engineering firm, Hebei Yineng, which has taken on multiple high-profile power plant projects and has a history of workplace fatalities.
Yineng has won contracts to build plants in more than a dozen provinces and in Turkey and Malaysia, according to previous interviews given by executives. In 2012, seven Yineng builders in a cooling tower in Yunnan province tumbled to their deaths after scaffolding collapsed. Three years before that, two workers died after a vehicle accidentally backed into a scaffolding support beam at a Yineng-built cooling tower in Guangdong province.