According to the latest CCTV news, the number of victims on the Meida Expressway has risen to 48. And this morning, according to Xinhua News Agency, by 5:30 a.m. on May 2, the number of victims was 36.
According to the press conference in Meizhou City, Guangdong, as of 2 p.m. today, 48 people have died in the landslide, another 3 people's DNA is being further compared, and 30 people have been injured. It is reported that the road collapse pavement is about 17.9 meters long and covers an area of about 184.3 square meters. As of 5 p.m. on May 1, the amount of blood sent to Meizhou People's Hospital has increased by 50% compared with the past.
The construction of Meida Expressway started on January 11, 2010 and was completed and put into operation on December 31, 2014, with a total length of 61.2 kilometers and a design speed of 100 kilometers per hour. Its completion shortens the drive time from Meizhou city to Xiamen to about 3 hours, and to Zhangzhou to about 2.5 hours.
After the accident, a number of witnesses posted videos of the scene, and one witness said that when his car passed by, the road surface was only cracked, or there were some small potholes. When I drove over, all the cars behind fell into a big pit of four or five meters. In the photo, the car fell into a deep pit, the scene caught fire, the explosion continued, and the scene was very chaotic.
In this accident, the truck driver and his wife found that there was an eldest sister in front of them who said that the road had collapsed and caught fire, so they quickly turned around and blocked the road, waved their hands to stop the car behind, and avoided a greater tragedy. "My refrigerated truck was wider than the road, 12.5 meters long, and all the cars couldn't pass, so I stopped them and said that the bridge in front of me had collapsed, so don't go any further. Mr. Wang, a truck driver, said.
Meida high-speed collapse, multi-party professional analysis——
The direct cause of this high-speed landslide disaster is the recent continuous rainfall in the local area, the terrain along the Meida Expressway is steep, the terrain is complex, mostly mountainous and hilly areas, the ravines are dense, and the side of the incident is close to the mountain.
Rainwater erosion will lead the soil on the surface of the head, enter the crevices and generate water pressure, pushing the landslide body downward.
Before the accident, it had rained for nearly a month, and the rammed earth of the roadbed had been soaked in rainwater for a long time, and the rainfall could significantly reduce the bearing capacity of the foundation through the softening and erosion of the soil, increasing the pore water pressure and reducing the effective stress, which may lead to the collapse of the road surface.
In this landslide, many experts and industry insiders agreed that -
In this accident, we cannot attribute all the repeated accidents to precipitation, first of all, it has rained continuously for more than a month, and there have been many precedents of landslides, and the monitoring and early warning are not in place. After all, the Meida Expressway was the highest among the mountainous expressways in Guangdong Province at that time, and there were many high-risk situations such as roofing, landslides, and water permeability during the construction.
"Such landslides, there are generally obvious phenomena in the early stage, and the potential landslide area can be predicted, and some satellite detection and monitoring methods can also be fed back to the safety center for early warning, and then decide whether to close the high-speed company. Some industry insiders said.
In addition, before the accident, the meteorological department had warned that this heavy rainfall was a factor contributing to the collapse of the road surface, and the risk of geological disasters was extremely high. But these early warnings have also been ignored.
Some professionals believe that "the roadbed is not solid and the method of cushioning the soil is not good, and there are design problems", "Judging from the photos of the collapsed section, the thin road surface is full of soil, and there is almost no stone to see." "How can this kind of steep slope section not even have steel bars, when the Fokai Expressway was paved with steel bars on the flat ground. Some netizens said that this kind of structure is easy to cause landslides due to excessive rainfall.
"This kind of soft foundation slope needs to be piled, and the pavement with concrete steel frame structure can effectively prevent collapse and earthquake, but the price is not expensive. Some people in the industry questioned it.
There is also a suspected infrastructure professional who said: "This section of the road belongs to the obvious high-fill road section. There are design problems - anti-slide piles or anti-slip retaining walls should be set at the foot of the slope, and the backfill should be made of stony soil or limestone, and geogrids should be added to strengthen and enhance the integrity of the fill. Whether the construction unit is in strict accordance with the specifications and design drawings of the construction, it is necessary to ask the five parties responsible for the main body. ”
"Look at the high masonry slope on the site, the design should have a gravity concrete retaining wall to prevent landslides, but the site design is not supported by the soil retaining wall, which is a mistake at the design level, and it is necessary to investigate from the survey, design, quality inspection, owner, cost consulting, supervision and construction unit, so that you can understand the engineering quality of the road section. ”
The Guangdong Meida Expressway that occurred this time also had a collapse due to heavy rain in 2023, and it was reported by Guangdong Economic Television and Pearl River News at that time, according to the traffic control announcement at the time: After on-site investigation, it was found that the geology was complex, the slope was unstable, and there were major safety hazards of tens of thousands of square meters of earthwork overturning lanes.
Since there was already a landslide last year, have you fulfilled your maintenance responsibilities under such heavy rainfall this year?
Considering that after the heavy rainfall, it is the long-term super-large traffic flow on May Day, if the blockage of the drainage system of the original collapsed road section and the cracks on the road surface are investigated in advance, based on the experience of last year's collapse accident, timely maintenance and maintenance, this tragedy may be avoided.
Therefore, this accident may not be completely attributed to natural disasters, and the man-made factors (road design, survey and design, construction, operation and maintenance management) and other factors cannot be underestimated. Whether it is a natural disaster or a man-made disaster, and how much of it is each, we still wait for the results of the follow-up investigation.
The Meida Expressway collapse accident gives a safety warning to all car owners
The warning significance of this incident is that we should have preventive driving habits when driving at high speeds, do not pile up at high speeds, and it is very important to distance ourselves and develop safe driving habits.
From the point of view of time, the May Day holiday time, high-speed is the peak period of the year's traffic flow, large traffic flow, speed affected, night driving, and driver fatigue driving factors, otherwise if there is a car in front of the fall, in the case of keeping an eye on the road conditions and keeping the distance between cars, the car behind should have time to react and brake.
Then the important reason behind this is that the traffic flow is too large, the high-speed is too congested, and the distance between the vehicles is not opened, which leads to a large number of cars crowded in the road section before and after the collapse, and the cars in front and behind have no time to react, and there is not enough distance between vehicles to avoid.
At that time, some witnesses said that at that time, several cars found that something was wrong in front of them and got out of the car to stop their cars, and several cars in front of them had already fallen down, and explosions continued to be heard, and it was the first time that they felt so close to death.
The driver's experience factor in preventive driving can sometimes save lives, and experienced veteran drivers know that due to low visibility at night, veteran drivers have such a saying when driving at night, "Where the lights shine, go gray and not white, and stop when you see dark." ”
That is, when driving at night, you should drive the vehicle in a place where the road color is gray, and the waterlogged road surface is generally white at night under the light, and the black road is generally a large pothole on the road. In particular, there are no street lights on the collapsed road section, so the place where the headlights shine is often a faulty black, in this case, it is generally necessary to reduce speed or brake urgently or change lanes.
The old driver driving on the highway, will predict the road conditions and seek the best view, the so-called best view is to see the farther the better, once there is a car in front of the car to block the view, then the conditions to try to change lanes to find the best view, try to see the road conditions more than 200 meters ahead.
When there is no best vision, the traffic in front or the curve blocks the vision ahead, it is necessary to slow down, the place where the collapse occurred, there was just a turn, blocking the line of sight, plus high-speed driving is often closed windows, the loss of sensitivity to the sound of the outside world, coupled with the fatigue and loss of vigilance at night, resulting in some car owners did not do a good prediction. Fortunately, the well-intentioned retrograde person disregarded his safety and ran back a few hundred meters to stop the car, preventing a greater tragedy from happening.
This also reminds car owners to drive, especially high-speed, travel on holidays, need to have preventive driving habits, do not pile up, keep the distance between cars, seek the best vision, and also need to have a basic understanding and grasp of the high-speed road conditions and weather conditions in advance. In fact, map manufacturers also need to do a good job of optimization in this regard, and for road sections that have had landslides, they should have earlier reminders to remind drivers to pay attention in advance.
For this collapse accident, according to the wreckage of the vehicle at the scene, the vehicle is almost full, which means that some families have suffered a catastrophe, more than 30 deaths, it is a major accident, not to mention that the number of victims reached 48 people, the entire high-speed system, there will be someone responsible, who should be responsible, no one can run.
This collapse accident also needs to be reflected. The maintenance and construction of expressways require the establishment of a stricter engineering supervision system, maintenance and maintenance system, and an effective supervision and emergency response mechanism. Now the number of cars in China is getting higher and higher, and the safety of high-speed driving is almost related to the safety of every family, and such a tragedy cannot be repeated.
Author: Wang Xinxi, Senior Reviewer of TMT This article is not reproduced without permission