Avalanche buries PetroChina crew

Four PetroChina employees are dead and several are missing after an avalanche in north-western China’s Xinjiang region buried workers digging a tunnel for the company’s second west-to-east gas pipeline.

The avalanche struck at a mountain construction site for the 30 billion-cubic-metre-a-year pipeline linking Turkmenistan and eastern and southern China. About 70 workers were digging a 3.8-kilometre tunnel for the pipeline in the northern part of Xinjiang. More than 200 rescue workers were now searching for the missing, it said. The news service said 12 workers were buried by the avalanche, of which four had been found dead. The rescue operation was slowed by sub-freezing temperatures and heavy snow, deputy chief Zhang has been qouted as saying. "Machines, like bulldozers, can hardly get in as the road linking the construction site and the outside was covered by about one metre of snow," he said. PetroChina started building the pipeline in February. The $20.3 billion link consists of one trunk line and eight branch lines with a total length of 9102 kilometres. The western section of the line is scheduled to start operation next year. PetroChina already operates China's flagship west-east pipeline connecting gas fields in the Xinjiang region with the commercial hub of Shanghai, 4000 kilometres away on the east coast.

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