China: Mudslide buries 33 houses, 91 people missing

Four months after huge chemical blasts at the northern port of Tianjin killed more than 160 people, a huge mound of mud and construction waste collapsed at a business park in southern China and buried 33 buildings with at least 91 people unaccounted for in the country’s latest industrial disaster.

Eyewitnesses say mud and waste smashed into multi-storey buildings at the Hengtaiyu industrial park in the city’s northwestern Guangming New District, toppling them in collisions that sent rivers of earth skyward.

Read also: 21 workers killed in China coal mine blaze

Moments after the incident which occurred in the southern boom town of Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong, Premier Li Keqiang ordered an official investigation into Sunday’s landslide.

“I saw red earth and mud running towards the company building,” one local worker was quoted by the official Xinhua news agency as saying.

One woman told the Shenzhen Evening News newspaper that she saw her father buried by earth in his truck.

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