Homes ruined by foundation troubles

• Source: Global Times
• [09:38 July 13 2010]
• Comments

A resident walks by the building she lives in Monday, the foundation of which is deteriorating due to poor construction of the new Jiangsu Road station along the Line 11 subway. Photo: Cai Xianmin

By Liu Dong

With the typhoon season approaching next month, residents living near new subway lines are worried further hardship is coming with more flooding in their homes expected, due to poor construction that has caused the foundation of their homes to deteriorate.

Despite repeated attempts to lobby authorities, urging them to fix the problem that began affecting residential buildings close to the Guilin Road station along the Line 9 subway as early as 2008, when its construction work began, residents have not received help in repairing the eroding foundation beneath their homes.

"Our building has sunk something like 15 centimeters over the past two years," Li Jisheng, who lives on the ground floor at one of the residential compounds on Yishan Road near the Guilin Road station in Xuhui district, told the Global Times Monday. "Whenever it rains a lot, my home floods and sometimes the water levels reach up to 10 centimeters.

"My furniture gets all wet and sometimes I lose power in my home," said the man, who has a banner hanging in protest outside his home that reads: "Our building is leaning, falling and splitting apart, and is not safe."

Similar problems have been experienced by residents near the Jiangsu Road station along the Line 11 subway, construction for which began in 2007. Though these homes have passed government safety inspections, with the most recent one conducted last year by the Shanghai Housing Quality Inspection Station, residents say the results were skewered.

Sneaking suspicions

"The report must have been manipulated because the reality of the situation is really bad," Xu Jinyan, a resident living near the Jiangsu Road station in Changning district, told the Global Times Monday. "The walls are starting to crack, and even my microwave and washing machine have stopped working properly."

But Zhao Jun, director of the Construction and Transportation Commission in Changning district, the government body in charge of the inspections, said that the foundation for the buildings are fine, measuring six per thousand of inclination, below 10 per thousand, which is the national standard for concern.

Though buildings with a foundation of such a measurement are not in danger of collapsing, without reinforcement, the problem will worsen over time, Chen Shuli, an architect from Shanghai Construction and Design Research Institute, told the Global Times Monday.

"Such buildings will sink deeper if their foundation is not properly supported," he said. "This problem can cause a lot of headache for residents."