Source: Overseas Network
"With so many people, so many departments, and so many fields, if any of them had worked seriously, this accident could have been avoided. This is not a natural disaster, this is a man-made disaster. ”
The annual anti-corruption feature film "Continue to Make Efforts to Promote in Depth" disclosed the details of the investigation of the collapse of the "4.29" particularly major residential self-built house in Changsha, Hunan: After investigation, the Party Central Committee, the State Council and the Hunan Provincial Party Committee and Provincial Government have carried out special actions six times to require the investigation and rectification of illegal houses, but this fatal self-built house has become a fish that has slipped through the net six times in a row.
On April 29, 2022, a resident's self-built house in Wangcheng District, Changsha, Hunan Province, suddenly collapsed in a sit-down manner. Source: CCTV News
One
At 12:24 on April 29, 2022, a self-built house built by residents in Wangcheng District, Changsha, Hunan Province collapsed, killing 54 people, injuring 9 people, and causing a direct economic loss of 90.7786 million yuan.
The first self-built house was built in 2012. At the beginning, it was a 5-storey building and a partial 6-storey building, but in 2018, the homeowner added 8 floors and 9 floors without authorization, and the height of the building once exceeded 26 meters, but only the first floor used solid brick walls, and the second to fifth floors were all empty bucket walls.
The structure of the self-built house involved (Source: CCTV News)
For such a high-risk house, the relevant departments have engaged in "selective blindness"-
In 2016, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development carried out a special treatment of illegal construction in urban built-up areas, but the local government did not include it in the scope of rectification on the grounds that Wangcheng had not been withdrawn from the county for a long time, and in 2018, Hunan carried out a special treatment of illegal construction in the county, and the local government regarded Wangcheng as a district and was again excluded from the scope of rectification.
In July 2020, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development deployed a one-year "two-violation inventory" work, the Hunan Provincial Department of Housing and Urban-Rural Development forwarded a notice in September, Changsha City issued a plan in January of the following year, and Wangcheng District delayed until June 2021 - when there were only a few days left before the completion of the inventory.
As the deadline approached, Wangcheng District simply falsely reported the data: on June 29, it was reported that 217 buildings had been investigated, which were changed to 81,668 buildings only 6 days later, and 18,238 buildings a month later. The staff of the Hunan Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection and Supervision revealed: The people involved did not think about it carefully at first, and reported the data high, but later felt that it was "unrealistic" and hurriedly lowered the data.
In June 2021, when a house collapsed in Rucheng, Chenzhou, only a few hundred kilometers from Changsha, Changsha City was still not alert, and replaced the actual work with meetings and documents in the relevant investigations, putting the responsibility on the community and letting the temporary employees "pretend".
What's even more incredible is that not only is no one to take care of high-risk self-built houses, but there are also people who help issue safety appraisal reports. Liu Wanquan, former deputy captain of the Public Security Management Brigade of the Wangcheng Branch of the Changsha Municipal Public Security Bureau, accepted benefits from a housing safety inspection company and recommended them to homeowners in the jurisdiction. More than 20 houses, including the self-built houses involved, were identified by visual inspection.
The housing in the relevant jurisdiction has "zero potential safety hazards". Source: CCTV News
Two
Regarding this accident, the feature film pointed out: "On issues related to the safety of people's lives, formalism and bureaucracy can really kill people. ”
According to the safety production management system formulated by the state, the production and business operation units generally bear the main responsibility for safety production, the party committee and the government carry out territorial management, the emergency management department comprehensively supervises, and the industry competent department supervises professionally. To put it simply, it is a three-level safety production management system of "higher-level government-grass-roots government-enterprise".
As a key part of the "three-tier system", the grassroots government has the responsibility to supervise production safety. However, just as Changsha's self-built houses have been "missed inspections" one after another, some grassroots government departments often have problems such as oversight, law enforcement is too lenient and too soft, and the relevant departments are not effective in performing their duties, which has also become an important factor in the frequent occurrence of safety accidents.
During the investigation, the author found that some grassroots cadres went through the motions in the safety inspection. A cadre in a certain county in Shandong said that there are many safety inspections arranged by higher-level units, and if they leave ledgers and traces for every hidden danger they find, they have to coordinate with many parties to promote rectification. But if you don't leave traces of these problems, you can excuse yourself by saying that you don't understand or grasp the situation, or prevaricate with reasons such as low level and unfamiliar business.
Wangcheng District of Changsha is located at the junction of urban and rural areas, and many residents build their own houses and illegally expand and add floors, which are all long-standing problems. Some cadres are not unaware of the hidden dangers of a large number of illegal buildings, but they also calculate: If they conscientiously put things in order, they will inevitably face the resistance of disputes and have to do a lot of hard work; if they go around the difficulties, as long as no accidents occur during their term of office, "everything will be fine."
The cadre involved said, "There should be no accident during my term of office." Source: CCTV News
Three
Of course, in addition to the work style of individual cadres, the reality of the lack of risk management capacity of some grassroots governments and departments cannot be ignored.
Zhou Zhengmao, the former deputy head of Wangcheng District, Changsha, said in the feature film: "(Investigation of illegal construction) is indeed too large and difficult. ”
The grassroots are afraid that there are too many problems of illegal construction that are difficult to rectify, one is the dilemma of manpower, the number of grassroots emergency management cadres is seriously insufficient, the two townships and two towns in the central part of the author's investigation, the emergency office personnel have not met the requirements of "no less than 3-5 staff";
In view of the problems exposed in the Changsha "4.29" accident, the accident investigation team put forward a number of suggestions for improvement measures, one of which is very important, that is, to vigorously improve the ability of grassroots safety management.
In the author's view, it is first necessary to optimize the power supervision of the grassroots security governance process. At this stage, the supervision of the work of the higher authorities at the grassroots level is mostly carried out in the form of ledgers, as if as long as the form book is compliant, the governance is in place. This can easily lead to grassroots cadres only seeking "face" and not seeking to check the details, accuracy, and precision, and to spend a lot of energy on filling in forms and "creating data." A grassroots cadre in Jiangsu told the author: "Cadres cannot collect data, submit reports, and write materials, but should sink their time and energy to the front line, set up special topics, and strictly grasp the major hidden dangers that have accumulated all year round and have been delayed for a long time. ”
Another example is the design of the supervision mechanism, the current risk management is basically "implicit performance management", it is difficult to measure with explicit performance indicators, to put it bluntly, as long as there is no accident, all over the country to do more and less, how many potential safety hazards have been investigated and managed, and there is no obvious gap in the performance in the short term, and it is easy to be thankless. It is necessary to optimize this supervision and management mechanism in a timely manner.
In addition, it is necessary to make great efforts to supplement the technical strength of grassroots security risk management. It can also consider building a local expert database, selecting skilled cadres to enrich the team, and can also use information technology, artificial intelligence and other means according to local conditions, strengthen the technical equipment for safety production supervision, establish a cross-industry and cross-departmental information sharing mechanism, and also realize the dynamic monitoring and management of risk points in the whole process through big data empowerment.
If you want to be in front of safety production and do it first, after all, no amount of repentance afterwards can save the lost life.
Text: Yang Lixin (School of Sociology, Wuhan University), Dian Cang
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Source/Xia Ke Island WeChat public account