Investigation of Collapsed Building Incidents on Soft Marine Deposit: Both from Social and Technical Perspectives

A collapsed incident occurred on 10 October 2016 in Wenzhou City, China, which resulted in 22 casualties and 6 injuries. Most of victims were migrant laborers (rural dwellers who move to urban for a temporary work), who rented apartments in these residential buildings, which were originally constructed by local rural residents. This case report investigates the collapsed incident as well as other similar previous incidents. From the perspectives of both social and technical aspects, this report analyzed the Chinese rural land use policy with relevant technical factors. These incidents reveal social problems of the existing dual structure land-use policy in China. Chinese dual structure land-use policy caused deficiencies in the supervision of the construction market in rural area so that the following technical factors were not well supervised by the various quality control departments: (1) poorly quality of residential buildings, (2) unauthorized rooftop additions, and (3) differential settlement caused by the uneven distribution of underlying Wenzhou clay under creep conditions. Mandatory regulation by the government for any construction in China, particularly for the construction of self-constructed house building sites in rural areas, was recommended to minimize the resettlement issue of migrant workers.