Authorities in eastern China’s Shandong province have shut down a local manufacturing company for allegedly producing substandard cement used to construct a school dormitory in a neighbouring province, it was reported.
The market supervision bureau of Taierzhuang District in the city of Zaozhuang issued a suspension order against the company that manufactured the cement after a private school’s principal filed a complaint over the 25 tons of allegedly low-quality construction material. The Zhicheng Experimental School in Henan province’s Luyi County had procured the cement through a third-party vendor to provide to builders working on the project.
Before the school filed a complaint to the district-level market supervision bureau in Shandong — where the company’s cement factory is located — it had also reported the case to a lower county-level bureau in Henan in April, nearly a month after it found the construction material too weak to hold the foundation of the planned four-story dormitory.
Shoddy construction materials in schools have made headlines recently, raising public concerns over potential health and safety hazards for students. In January, hundreds of students at a primary school in the eastern Zhejiang province suffered from nosebleeds and swollen lymph nodes after the school completed construction of a running track later found to be emitting toxic fumes. Recently, a local court accepted a case from a nonprofit suing the school and the two companies responsible for the track’s construction.
About 960 students, most of them so-called left-behind children, were scheduled to move into their new dorms in September. The private school with over 1,700 students had reportedly borrowed and raised more than 3 million yuan for the project.