Why was this the only tall in Bangkok to overturn after the earthquake?

Only one building in Bangkok fell during the earthquake on Friday that broke Myanmar, hundreds of miles away. Recovery efforts continue with at least 15 killed people and dozens are still missing. Determination of the cause could take months.

However, interviews with the workers in the area, along with the first official findings, underlined potential problems with the design and quality of the construction.

At the heart of the control is China Railway 10th Group of Engineers, a Chinese state -owned company with about twelve other projects in Thailand and whose contractors tried to remove documents from the post -disaster area.

Behind this Chinese company is its parent, China Railway Group – a Chinese giant infrastructure with growing debt, a hunger for new projects and subsidiaries facing accusations for weak security in various countries.

Bangkok workers told the New York Times that China Railway 10th, which was part of a building that manufactures the building, degraded contractors who turned to lower quality materials and used columns narrower than usual.

Thai officials who test the twisted metal from the ruins said they found inferior steel rods – made by a Thai factory with Chinese owners who had been closed in December.

An anti-corruption observer also said that he had highlighted construction irregularities in the 30-historical tower before March 28, when the abandonment of workers watched high lighting.

“The pillars on the third floor – wherever I was and looked back – the beams didn’t dug,” said Netiphong Phatthong, 38, an electrician who just escaped, waiting for the site for news for his missing friends on Tuesday. “They broke as the metals inside were crumpled.”

Thai officials, describing the collapse as a blow to the country’s image, have moved aggressively to investigate the consortium under the construction of $ 62 million for the tower. Was intended to accommodate government auditors.

At a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra ordered authorities to also check all the projects in Thailand on China 10th. He did not mention whether the parent company would be investigated.

“We really have to find an answer,” Ms. Paetongtarn told reporters. “We have to tell people and the world what happened in Thailand.”

Under pressure

The 30-Historical Tower consortium was registered in Thailand in 2018. It included a Thai programmer, the Italian-Tayilakia, but according to employees, daily businesses were carried out by China Railway 10th.

An advertising video recently released by the Chinese company showed the building flaps and praised the quality of its construction. China Railway 10th is also responsible for an airport terminal in southern Thailand which is supposed to be completed in January, but was less than 40 percent full of March, according to the Ministry of Transport.

China Railway 10th’s Bangkok office did not respond to e -mails looking for comments. The Chinese Embassy, ​​in a statement on Facebook, called on Chinese companies to work with the Tailand government investigation.

China’s railway team, the parent company, started building most of the nearly 30,000 miles of high -speed rail lines. But in recent years, as the demand for new home projects are faded, the company and its subsidiaries have expanded their scope to hurry to bring work.

His time often coincided with the priorities of the Chinese government. In 2019, as Beijing demanded closer ties to the Pacific, China’s railway team bought an inert gold mine on the islands of Solomon. Employees there said in times that security concerns were often ignored.

Along the way, the company’s debt increased. Its annual report of 2024 shows a total of 211 billion dollars worth, almost twice as much as $ 112 billion that the company brought five years ago.

Victor Shih, a specialist in Chinese politics and economics at the University of California, San Diego, said that when a company has such heavy debt, “the pressure to generate cash flow to the service’s debt can be quite intense”.

Another subsidiary of China’s railways has been accused – along with alleged corrupt officials – of collapsing a dome of the Railway Station in Serbia last November, which killed 15 people.

Adding pressure to Bangkok, the construction was behind the timetable. The building was less than half finished despite the start of 2020. Mana Nimitmongkol, president of the Thai corruption organization, said the government had threatened to cancel the project in 2024 due to delays.

Adding suspicions, four Chinese nationals who identified themselves as subcontractors were caught on the camera on the day after the earthquake removed from an office behind the ruins. They said to the authorities that it was for insurance claim. Police occupied the documents. The men were held and then released.

Weak materials

The building engineers in Bangkok fought to understand why the building is bent at the same time.

Pennung Warnitchai, director of the Thai earthquake research center, who helped design the Bangkok earthquake -resistant standards, said the building should have been able to stay up. The move of the soil detected in Bangkok after the earthquake that struck, said: “It was about one -third in half of the level we are considering in the design of typical buildings.”

Thailand generally follows an American model for protecting the earthquake, which means that skyscrapers start with a core of reinforced concrete. The core is usually a rectangular axis in the center of a building, with floors and vertical out -of -the -way support columns.

In the case of the building that fell, the designers put the off-core core, Mr Pennung said, adding that he saw the plans. Other buildings with similar design do not collapse. But because the distance of the earthquake created longer periods between the waves of motion and with much of the Bangkok built on soft soil, he said, the building may have swinged and turned, composing the danger.

Mr Pennung and several other engineers stressed that it was too early to determine the cause of the collapse. The quality of steel, design, working standards and ground could play a role. But he said that evidence from workers and officials had gathered so far, as well as the earthquake videos, suggested that cores and supporters pillars or columns gave way to the lower floors.

“It seems he collapsed from the bottom, not from the top,” he said.

Other experts agreed that the building was not overturned as much as the fall, which corresponds to accounts by workers who escaped at the last minute.

Six officials from the damaged building, who worked from the third to the 10th floors, said the project often seemed insecure. Some of the issues they mentioned were relatively small: many workers were wearing sneakers and not with steel boots. The requirements for the braid on higher floors were ignored.

Three workers with experience in several lower floors said that the columns of the building were thinner than those they had seen at other high -level construction sites. Apichat Chaihlao, who worked on the eighth floor, said his supervisor was so worried that he measured the column himself “and said that these pillars were not right.”

“I didn’t think about it at that time, but now,” he added, “compared to the other projects I worked, that term didn’t seem durable.”

Two subcontractors, who refused to give their names out of fear of retaliation by their employer, said that Chinese managers often ignored the suggestions of Thai bonds and used low quality contracts that led to lower quality materials.

Reports on the subsidiary of China Railway Group in Serbia also highlighted the lack of quality control. There, an engineer who had worked at the stationary station with the deadly collapse said that a contractor hired by the Chinese consortium had ignored the design standards and added additional concrete to the dome.

Nonthichai Likitaporn, director of Thailand’s Institute of Industrial Standards, said problems with the Bangkok building included the use of steel that was very weak.

Samples of steel rods in two sizes collected from the site failed tests from the Thai steel and steel institute for mass, chemistry and their ability to handle the pressure. Other samples were met the required standards, Mr Nonthichai said, but the problematic metal was made by the same Chinese company: Xin Ke Yuan Steel Co., which had a factory in Rayong province, Thailand.

The Thai authorities closed the plant in December, reporting the risks of safety after an accident involving gas leaks. More than 2,400 tonnes of steel were manufactured after tests found that its rod did not meet the approved criteria for water and boron content, undermining concrete adhesion and weakening its power.

Authorities have also asked company executives to recall every steel already sold. It is not clear that they did that.

The company was unable to approach for comments on the phone number mentioned on its website.

Chinese construction networks led by state -owned businesses have played important roles in the recent explosion of the Bangkok building, adding apartments, train lines and other projects. The Thai government has increasingly closer to China, which is Thai’s largest investor. Last month, at Beijing’s request, Thailand was deported 40 Uyghur asylum seekers back to China, drawing a sharp reprimand by United Nations officials and activists who had long warned that men would face any torture and prison.

Inside China, Beijing tried to censor the cover and the debate over it. An explanatory story about the structure of the building by a news agency, Caixin and a short piece by the official news agency, Xinhua, about the losses caused by the collapse, were soon removed after their publication.

But in Thailand, the fears of tall buildings are now common – and rage has increased.

“The public feeling of Thailand is increasingly criticizing Chinese business presence and government transactions,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor of political science and international relations at Chulalongkorn University.

“The collapse of the Chinese building,” he added, “is likely to reinforce this critical view.”

David Pierson and Berry wang They contributed reports from Hong Kong. Keith Bradsher and Lee from Beijing.