text: China landslide survivors describe escape from mountain of debris | Toronto Star
  China landslide survivors describe escape from mountain of debris
  One 21-year-old worker was saved by a door panel; others say they attempted to run away from the mud. "I had never run that fast before," says a man who carried his 5-year-old daughter to safety.
  Rescuers carry 19-year-old survivor Tian Zeming after he was pulled from debris on Wednesday, some 67 hours after a giant flow of mud and construction waste engulfed buildings in Shenzhen, China. (AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
  BEIJING—Squeezed into a narrow room under piles of debris for 67 hours, a young man was saved by a door that trapped his foot but gave him space to survive. Rescuers on Wednesday pulled him from the massive mudslide that hit part of a major manufacturing city in southern China.
  Zhang Hu, a city vice mayor, told a news conference that four bodies had been found. He said that even though the critical 72-hour period to find survivors had passed, they were continuing rescue efforts with a team of 5,000.
  "As long as there is a sliver of hope, we will never give up," Zhang said.
  Residents have raised questions about why officials didn't act to stop the growing mountain of construction waste, which they said they had feared was dangerous.
  The Legal Evening News said a district government report in January found that the dump had received one million cubic metres of waste and warned of a "catastrophe."
  The Chinese government set up an investigative unit made up of representatives from nine government bodies to "look into" Sunday's landslide, the New China News Agency reported.
  Authorities have detained the vice chairman of a Shenzhen-based company, Yixianglong Investment, under suspicion that it had jurisdiction over the slag heap that collapsed and buried the area, the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper reported Tuesday.
  On Wednesday, more stories from survivors of the landslide began to emerge,
  Wang Yongquan, a migrant worker from Henan province, told the news agency that he escaped from the landslide with his 5-year-old daughter in his arms. "I had never run that fast before," he told the agency.
  "Dozens of people were trying to run away from the mud," another survivor, Zhou Suqing, 48, told the South China Morning Post. "Some were lucky enough to be pushed out by the impact of the landslide, but others were buried under the mud." Her husband had been buried alive, the paper said.
  "I wanted to communicate the information about where these people were probably buried to the rescue teams, but I had no chance to speak to them," she told the newspaper.