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Gas and water leaks in CBD area reveal public safety issues

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-22 07:53

Gas and water leaks in CBD area reveal public safety issues

On Monday, the water and gas pipelines near the Guomao Bridge broke at the same time, flooding the road, disrupting traffic and cutting water supplies to about 600 households for hours.

The accident site smelled of gas and a passer-by walked through the site near lit a cigarette. Others fortunately stopped him in time, preventing a bigger tragedy.

Construction workers laying underground cables broke the pipelines. The Beijing Information Infrastructure Construction Company, which is responsible for the accident, said they have a construction map, but one drawn by themselves.

Inaccurate construction maps, plus the practice of digging up the roads at will, led to the accident. The local water supply company said that every year there are 30 to 40 such accidents.

Residents in Beijing are all too familiar with information, gas or water companies digging up roads. Residents joke that officials should install a zipper so these companies can deal with the pipelines more conveniently.

With such a high accident rate, the relevant management department should do more to regulate how roads are dug up. How can they tolerate such a situation?

In the Guomao Bridge accident, the time wasted and economic cost was substantial. The water and gas companies sent 60 and 200 emergency workers, respectively. Buses on 15 lines had to make a detour. The amount of gas and water lost was not small.

Furthermore, as an important business center, a large number of world-famous companies and hotels are concentrated around the Guomao Bridge. City managers should attach higher importance to safety in such a densely populated area with so much construction.

Authorities should stage drills to deal with emergencies concerning the public and take measures to enhance safety.

The Central Business District area is going to expand eastward and it is playing an increasingly important role in driving the capital's economic development. The safety issue should be placed high on the agenda during this expansion.

Excerpts from a comment in Beijing News

Elite colleges show off with deceptive statistics

Peking and Tsinghua universities have fought another verbal war, this time about statistics for student enrollment.

Both claimed they had enrolled more provincial winners in the national entrance examination.

In later explanations, they said their figures disagreed with each other because they had resorted to different methods to make sense of the statistics. Some of those counted, for example, included students who were awarded additional points for having special skills or belonging to an ethnic group.

In their logic, a university's status can be demonstrated by the number of top-score students they can enroll. This is actually a testimony to the blind worship of grades.

A student's talent cannot be solely measured by how many points he scores in one examination. Experience from the past 30 years indicates that few of the top performers in the college entrance examination have outstanding careers.

On a trial basis, the two top universities have been granted more autonomy in the way they choose their students. The change is part of an effort to break the current system of selection, which is based solely on scores.

The two universities' emphasis on winners in the entrance examination, however, makes the experiment meaningless. Worse, they are setting a bad example for middle and primary schools.

First-class universities around the world pay attention to how well their students perform after graduation and make necessary adjustments to their evaluation standards. Few Chinese universities, however, keep track of their graduates.

Excerpts from a comment in Beijing Youth Daily

(China Daily 07/22/2010)