67 killed as scaffolding collapses at east China power plant

State media say the death toll from the collapse of scaffolding at a construction site in eastern China has jumped to 67, with two other workers injured and one more missing.

China’s state broadcaster CCTV says more than 100 paramilitary police have joined in efforts to rescue workers trapped when a work platform at a power plant construction site came tumbling down Thursday morning.

The plant’s cooling tower was being built in the city of Fengcheng in Jiangxi province.

The latest reported death toll suggests that nearly all the construction workers at the cooling tower perished. Local media reports say close to 70 people were working at the site when the scaffolding collapsed.

Footage showed iron pipes, steel bars and wooden planks strewn across the floor of the cooling tower.

China has suffered a series of major industrial accidents in recent years that have been blamed on corruption, disregard for safety and pressure to boost production amid a slowing economy.

The head of a logistics company was recently handed a suspended death sentence over a massive explosion at an illegal chemical warehouse in the northern port of Tianjin last year that killed 173 people, most of them firefighters and police officers.

In June 2015, 442 people were killed when a modified cruise ship capsized on the Yangtze River; poor decisions by the captain and crew were blamed. Last December, 81 people were killed when an enormous, man-made mountain of soil and waste collapsed on nearly three dozen buildings in the southern manufacturing center of Shenzhen.

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UPDATES:

2:10 a.m., Nov. 24: This article was updated with a revised death toll of 67.

This article was original posted at 10:05 p.m., Nov. 23.