The Hindu : International : 62 students killed in flash flood in China

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jun 12, 2005

International

International

62 students killed in flash flood in China

EIJING: A torrential flood hit a school in northeast China and swept 64 persons to their death while a fire in the south raced through the top floors of a hotel and killed 31, state media reported on Saturday.

Authorities in Beijing were struggling to handle the two tragedies thousands of km apart, trying to overcome faulty communication in the flood zone and vowing to dispatch an emergency team of investigators to the hotel fire.

The flash flood on Friday inundated a school in Shalan, a remote town in China's far north-eastern province of Heilongjiang, claiming the lives of 62 students and two villagers, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Some 352 students — all between 6 and 14 years old — and 31 teachers were in the school when it was slammed by a torrent of water from heavy rains gushing down a mountain, the agency said.

Hotel fire

In the far south, a fire engulfed the top three floors of a hotel, killing 31 persons, state media said.

The fire broke out at noon on Friday at the Huanan Hotel in Shantou, a city in Guangdong province, and swept through the top stories of the four-storey building, the reports said.

Another 15 persons were injured, four of them seriously, it said.

It was not clear how many persons were in the hotel at the time of the blaze, which took three hours to extinguish.

Images on state television showed the neighborhood shrouded in heavy smoke, and still photographs showed firefighters removing tanks of cooking gas from the hotel. — AP

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