China completes safety check on school buildings
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China has completed safety inspection on most of the 338,000 primary and secondary school buildings nationwide, the Ministry of Education said Tuesday.
By the end of October, a total of 1.41 billion square meters of school buildings have been inspected, accounting for 98.7 percent of total areas of school buildings, according to the ministry.
More than 82 million sq.m. of school buildings have started reconstruction or reinforcement, or 9.6 percent of the total areas that need repair, according to the ministry.
In some of the country's central and western areas which have dense population and high quake intensity, more than 27 million sq.m. of school buildings have kicked off reconstruction or reinforcement.
The school building inspection was started in May to find out safety flaws. China also started a three-year nationwide school reinforcement project from May to improve school building's capabilities to survive disasters such as earthquakes, landslides, floods and typhoons.
The central government promised earlier to allocate at least 24 billion yuan (3.5 billion U.S. dollars) in the upcoming three years to support reinforcement of buildings in earthquake prone areas such as central and western China.
However, it was estimated that at least 200 billion yuan (29.4 billion U.S. dollars) was needed for reinforcement of all rural school buildings in those regions.
The ministry said earlier the rest of the money would be raised by governments at the provincial level.
The quality of schools in southwest China's Sichuan Province has been a major source of discontent and complaint for local parents whose children died in the devastating 8.0-magnitude quake on May 12 last year.
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