I am sure you might have heard this already but the latest craziness here comes from northwest China's Gansu Province where least 18 pre-school children were killed when an overloaded kindergarten minibus collided head-on with a truck. The bus driver and a teacher also died in the crash. Another 44 children were injured, 12 of them seriously. Terrible does not describe the accident, but what is just so crazy is the school bus was a mini van built to carry nine passengers but 62 children were crammed inside.
A preliminary investigation found that the bus had been driving fast on the wrong side of the road (what else is new) on a street shrouded in heavy fog when the accident happened. The collision with the truck occurred at around 9:15am in Zhengning County of Qingyang City.
The minibus was taking the children to a kindergarten after picking them up from remote farmlands. Five people, including bus driver Yang Haijun and four children, died at the scene. The teacher and 14 children died later either on their way to hospital or while they were being treated for their injuries. Of the 44 children who survived, 12 sustained severe injuries with two of them in a critical condition.
"This accident says a lot about the problems with the local government's role of monitoring school safety," said Liu Shanying, a public administration expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
To me it says that no matter how advanced and comopolitan the urban cities of China may be, there majority of the rural population has a long way to go to catch up. My guess is someone on the school board or in fact the whole school board will be executed for this but that won't solve the problem. The Chinese are extremely resourceful, especially the poor but this action was clearly irresponsible and crazy.
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