Officials who are believed to bear some responsibility in relation to school collapses that killed thousands of students in the May 12 earthquake have pledged greater efforts to investigate why many schools crumbled while nearby buildings stayed erect.

"Seeking truth is more important than losing face," said Lin Qiang, vice inspector of the Sichuan provincial educational department. He requested the province's organizing committee for the Olympic torch relay to disqualify him as a torch bearer.

"As an educational administrator, I bear special, though not direct, responsibility towards those innocent children and their parents and relatives. I feel profoundly apologetic to them. So I have to reject the honor of relaying the Olympic torch as atonement."

Lin was among the first educational officials to arrive on the scene after the magnitude 8.0 quake erupted beneath Wenchuan County.

At the ruins of a collapsed building of the Beichuan Middle School, he saw parents crying and digging for their buried children with their bare hands, which struck his conscience.

The five-story building was destroyed almost instantly and about 1,300 students and teachers are believed to have died in their classrooms.

"Society should assume responsibility for the school collapses and the educational sectors should come first," Lin told local newspapers.

Why some schools survived

Lin also saw a Hope Project primary school, about 700 meters from the Beichuan Middle School, survive the disaster. There were three injuries but no fatalities at the second school, which had been donated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"Its construction quality was ensured under the donor's supervision. But most of the collapsed schools had no such supervisory mechanism."

Said Lin: "If we educational officials hadn't left loopholes for corruption, the collapsed buildings could have been as solid as the primary school."

Gone in ten seconds

When the quake struck, the Fuxin No. 2 Primary School in Mianzhu City was leveled within 10 seconds, leaving 127 students dead. However, most of the surrounding residences remained standing, including those built in the 1960s.

On Sunday, more than 100 parents of children killed in the collapse marched downtown with placards bearing slogans and photographs of their children, questioning the construction quality and asking the authorities to investigate.

"They are heartbroken and demand an explanation. I can fully understand that," said Jiang Guohua, party secretary of Mianzhu City. "So I wouldn't evade them and walked up to them myself."

Jiang knelt before the bereaved parents, trying to persuade them not to go any further.

"I promise to produce a solution within a month. If the collapse was caused by construction problems, we will seriously deal with it according to the law. We will mete out due punishment to people accountable for that, as well as compensate the victims' families," Jiang said.

In Mianzhu City, eight schools would be examined by experts. "All of the experts were invited by the province from other cities to maintain justice," Jiang said.

Meanwhile in Dujiangyan City, a city government official told Xinhua that the government would severely punish those responsible if they found quality problems at the Juyuan Middle School. About 900 students and teachers were buried when their classrooms collapsed and about 240 were confirmed dead.

The city government set up an investigation team and met with parents of the deceased students.

As of May 14, the quake was known to have left 6,898 school buildings in ruins, excluding those in Wenchuan and Beichuan counties. Further information about student casualties and destroyed schools was not immediately available, said Sichuan government spokesman Hou Xiongfei.

Old buildings, and too little time

On Sunday, Sichuan began investigating school building collapses. The Educational Department of Sichuan Province on Wednesday blamed design defects and obsolete buildings as reasons for the many collapses.

Another reason was that the quake exceeded the buildings' designed capacity. In addition, the quake occurred during class hours, so that buildings were full -- too full to be evacuated within the few seconds that it took for many buildings to collapse.

Yin Zhi, deputy dean of the School of Architecture of Tsinghua University in Beijing, has visited collapsed schools several times and said that further analysis was needed to determine the cause of these building failures.

"So long as the rubble stays there, we can take samples and make a judgement on the quality of the building."

The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has ordered local authorities to investigate why schools collapsed in the earthquake.

"School buildings should use structures that meet engineering and construction standards as well as local requirements on quake-resistance," said Yang Rong, director of the ministry's department of standards and norms.

The Ministry of Education had also ordered a strict check of school construction, especially in disaster areas and regions susceptible to quakes, ministry spokesman Wang Xuming told a press conference on Monday.

"We will cooperate with investigations by other authorities. If investigations show that shoddy work was responsible for the collapse of any school buildings, the offenders will be severely punished."

New standards planned

Wang also stressed that relevant departments were already considering tougher new quake-resistance standards for school buildings.

"A fundamental rule is that school buildings should have higher quake-resistance standards than normal buildings."

The official death toll from the May 12 quake stood at 68,516 as of 12:00 PM on Thursday. Another 365,399 people are reported injured and 19,350 missing, according to the State Council Information Office.

(Xinhua News Agency May 30, 2008)