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Shenzhen landslide offers reminder of need for greater industrial focus on safety
http://www.ecns.cn/voices/2015/12-21/193176.shtml
Dec 21st 2015, 02:35
A landslide on Sunday morning caused significant damage to an industrial park in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province. A total of 33 residential and industrial buildings were buried or damaged by the landslide and 59 people were still missing as of press time.
The disaster once again triggered concerns about potential safety problems related to industrial locations.
Similar concerns were expressed in August after the explosion at a chemical warehouse in Tianjin, an important industrial city in North China, as the warehouse was only 560 meters away from some residential communities.
Some observers said that Tianjin had overdeveloped its chemicals industry, and that this was perhaps one of the reasons for the deadly blast, because rising demand for storage of flammable and explosive materials could pose a security risk.
The damage caused by such incidents is extremely regrettable and lessons drawn from them should not be forgotten. Chinese firms should regard safety as a priority when it comes to site selection and design, and the safety factors needing attention cover a wide range of areas like the risk of natural disasters, the level of industrial concentration and the distance from residential communities.
Enhanced safety measures would of course raise costs for China's manufacturing sector, and make it harder for the country to offer a low-cost production base.
This would be in line with the strategy to shift China from being a "world factory" to an advanced industrialized nation by 2025, but it would also require greater efforts from the country's manufacturers to deal with the challenges brought by increased production costs.
However, we are in an irreversible process toward higher safety standards.
According to media reports, more than 1,000 companies involved in handling or manufacturing dangerous chemicals in densely populated areas have been ordered to renovate or close their facilities since 2014, and the process has hastened since the Tianjin explosion.
The central government has made efforts to bring the whole nation together to rescue survivors following disasters in previous years.
And amid the current case in Shenzhen, the local authorities responded quickly, with Xu Qin, mayor of Shenzhen, leaving a conference he had been attending in Beijing and returning to organize the rescue effort immediately after the landslide happened. In the future, the authorities are likely to pay more attention to enhancing safety measures in order to avoid similar accidents, and Chinese manufacturers should actively adapt to the new measures.
The author Hu Weijia is a reporter with the Global Times.
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