Day 2 - Back in Business

http://www.sinaimg.cn/dy/slidenews/1...293_554539.jpg

http://www.sinaimg.cn/dy/slidenews/1...295_654477.jpg

Oy. I hardly think a US military equipment crash and concealment of technology is an apt comparison to a major failure of a commercial public transport system.

And I'd believe the Chinese gov't/ Ministry of Railways would be arrogant and tone-deaf enough to pull just this sort of stunt, regardless of onlookers and cameras. If anybody can take a bad situation and screw it up even further, it would be Chinese officialdom. It's been done before.

There should be greater transparency as far as the actions at
the scene of the accident. It appears as though the bulk of the
responders were private citizens.

Here the area would be sealed by law enforcement and access would only be allowed to FD, EMS, and investigators.

Where are the bodies being buried?

Also, they were right to knock down that car before recovering bodies. It was in a precarious situation, you don't risk lives on body recovery in a situation like that. Make sure there's nobody alive and then get it stable before you recover the bodies.

One body falls from the car at 9 seconds; another is seen buried by debris at 2:56 (as per the video title: 视频: 温州动车暴力破拆——9秒和2分56秒有人掉下来了). It's a bit hard to make out in this version; it's a screen capture of the original which was already pulled.

Edit: There's also an article describing this in English from the Telegraph here.

tianjin to qingdao just left 25 minutes late...people are scared...and somehow they oversold first class

Very accurate and good article indeed, and mostly refrained from the train-bashing coming from that corner.

But I do think the author could have pinpointed the issue of "gaining and losing face" a bit more. As it has a lot to do with this accident and the underlying problems, IMHO.

Except at the time they did the knocking, they weren't really sure there were no survivors. Whichever gov't officials gave the order was based on their assumption, or maybe they didn't want to bother looking. I was shocked at how quickly the official pronouncement was made that there were "no more survivors," given the extent of the mess. And which turned out to be premature indeed. FWIW, the vertical car could have been multiple-tethered and then braced in position enough to allow a couple of rescue workers to actually take a good look. It's not rocket science with the heavy construction equipment around to do this.

I have not heard concrete pronouncement of how many people were in the affected cars. But for four cars (I believe that's the number most directly affected), plus the other more minor injuries in cars that stayed on the tracks, the total official number of dead and injured being only about 250 people seems awfully low, based on my experience of how full Chinese trains usually are. My next question would be: what happened to the rest of the passengers that were presumably in those cars? I can't believe there aren't still people missing, and some reports coming out of the media there seem to describe people still looking for loved ones that were on one of those trains.

Maybe the US would be placated by seeing dozens
of satellite news trucks and sky news choppers covering
the scene with an incident command post set up and
every conceivable response vehicle ever invented on the planet
flashing their Chinese made light bars.

You see a group of citizens in shorts and no shirt rescueing
the wounded and write it off as third world, phantasies of
bodies falling off trains and being crushed by mechanized
excavators. Non existent rail cars being buried.

Just come to grip with reality. The party is over.

Your post created an image in my mind with Geraldo decked out in "over the top" rain gear with a rain machine drenching him just off set. To come to think of it, Fox could pull that sort of thing off without ever leaving their studios.

Heard that the trains have started up again.

Is there any truth to that?

Check out post #61. I can't tell if any PhotoShop is at play there, but some pictures are still worth 1,000 words. Can you imagine looking out the window and seeing that? (When I was a kid in Boston, an airplane went off the end of the runway and its nose/cockpit split from the frame and fell into the harbor; the airport authority took its precious time cleaning that up. I thought to myself, I'm glad we're not flying that airline.)

Yes

I can see an image of Geraldo in the Underground City of Beijing shooting
a TV special claiming to have found Chairman Mao's secret vault.

If he could pull in 30 mil viewers here in US he might be able to hit
100 million in China.

News websites and on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, the official Xinhua news agency said the government had given one victim's family Rmb500,000 ($77,600) as compensation, which is more than three times the maximum legislated for train accident deaths.

In the US settlement for wrongul death train accident would be 2-3 million. So 30 times higher then China.