A photographer captured the incredible moment that two firefighters — embracing one another — fell to their deaths after being blasted from the 13th floor of a Shanghai apartment building last Thursday.

Shanghai Daily reports that the firefighters were Qian Lingyun, 23, and Liu Jie, 20. They landed on top of a second-floor platform of the building on Longwu Road in Xuhui District, and died from their injuries at the hospital.

Group leasing and electric wiring is being blamed for the cause of the fire and explosion.

Some neighbors in the building said there were several different groups of tenants squeezed into the apartment.

Pictures aired on a local TV station showed at least three double bunk beds inside the three-roomed apartment. What was left of a moped could be seen among the debris while another two were parked in the corridor outside.

Firefighters said there were a number of electrical items plugged into the apartment’s sockets and a lot of electric wiring in all three rooms.

UPDATE, 5/7, 12:33 pm: Via Shanghai Daily:

Thousands of people gathered at the Longhua Funeral Home yesterday morning to pay their respects to the two firefighters who plunged to their deaths from a 13th story window last Thursday.

…The officers were honored as Revolutionary Martyrs and members of the Communist Party of China, and awarded Top-Level Merit Citations and Shanghai May 4 Youth Medals, officials said.

(H/T That’s Online)

The new deputy chief of Qianjiang township in Laibin, Guangxi is dead. Zhong Xiefei, on the night of April 9, died while solemnly performing his duty as loyal servant of the people. Let this be a warning for all those in China who aspire for public office… –

Zhong drank too much rice wine at lunch and succumbed to alcohol poisoning –

…you best not be a lightweight when it comes to liquor.

Seven officials who drank with Zhong have been fired.

All this is via SCMP:

Zhong’s family that night found him asleep and snoring loudly, but saw nothing to suggest he had drunk a dangerous amount. He was found dead about 6am the next day.

Losing face is not fatal, but losing to alcohol is: stuff they don’t teach you in Chinese Civics 101, but probably should. If you’re going to play the big-swinging-dick game with liquor, make sure you know what you’re doing.

Chinese official dies after drinking too much first day on the job (SCMP)

Rabies is a third-world problem: it’s treatable as long as you have money and access to the proper medical care. (Ninety-five percent of human deaths are in Asia and Africa, according to the World Health Organization.) In Jiangsu province, a father chose — out of monetary reasons — to not seek treatment after sucking blood out of a dog bite on his son, and is dead as a result.

Shanghai Daily has this sad story:

The victim’s son was taken to the hospital and received rabies vaccine shots after his father, a 41-year-old man surnamed Jiang, tried to remove any infection he may have been exposed to by sucking blood from the bite. The boy was bitten by a stray dog.

The father, a villager of Sitong County, was worried about the cost and didn’t get the same shots. Fellow villagers said he also thought it unlikely that people would be infected by the rabies virus through the mouth and he thought taking shots too troublesome.

China has the second highest mortality rate from rabies in the world, behind India — about 2,000 deaths per year. It’s why authorities, especially in rural villages, occasionally “crack down” on dogs — it’s easier than vaccinating everyone, unfortunately. And so, this story gives us another opportunity to count our blessings. We never have to worry about dying from rabies, since we do not live in a poor rural village. How lucky.

Dad dies of rabies after trying to treat son’s dog bite by sucking blood from wound (Shanghai Daily)

A pair of sisters, ages 4 and 2, died inside their home’s washing machine on Saturday around 1:30 pm in Nanchang, Jiangxi province. The details are grisly.

The girls, surnamed Tu, were reportedly playing at home when they somehow both fell into the washing machine and got tangled in the revolving gears. (One of them must have powered on the machine?) They both died of apparent asphyxiation.

Both parents were home at the time: the father was in his room listening to music, and the mother was preparing food. A one-year-old boy was also in the house.

An unidentified person who accompanied the children to the hospital told Beijing Times: “At the time, the children’s faces, noses had been mangled inside the washing machine and bloodied, and also swollen beyond recognition. There were purple bruises all over their bodies, and the washing machine was filled with blood.”

Filled with blood.

Obviously there are unanswered questions, which we’ll leave unasked for the moment, but police have ruled out foul play. Investigators found a step-stool next to the washing machine (pictured above) and concluded the children must have crawled in, for whatever reason.

However. Yesterday, the local police bureau said they never received a call about the incident on the day it happened. The young children’s bodies were also interred before they could investigate. It was only two days later, on September 23, that the victims’ family filed a report, arousing plenty of suspicion from netizens.

As for why the girls were interred so quickly, the grandfather issued this response: “The girls were so beyond recognition at the time, it was painful to look. And since they were small, according to local custom, they should be allowed to rest in peace.”

The police say the mother and father have a good relationship. They found no signs of foul play.

As for the washing machine’s ability to kill, authorities are still investigating.

This is weird and tragic rolled up in one. Watch as, at the 20-second mark, a young boy in red starts galloping alongside an ambulance that also happens to be accelerating. And then watch, at the 24-second mark, as the ambulance judders to a stop.

This next part is slightly disturbing: the young boy is dragged from out underneath the vehicle, which apparently ran him over. Nearly a minute later, the ambulance driver turns on the sirens and speeds away with the injured boy.

This happened on Sunday in a Wenzhou, Zhejiang province residential neighborhood, according to microblogger @路人大猛羽, via Xinhua. The boy was pronounced dead that afternoon.

A reporter later learned that the boy’s grandmother is apparently a janitor who works inside the residential compound. She was locking up when her grandson ran off, according to an eyewitness surnamed Xu. Tragedy then struck.

According to another witness, the boy may have dropped his toy in front of the ambulance’s right wheel.

Authorities are currently investigating the incident.

This is quite the tragic story. On August 9 at about 4 pm, a young man, reportedly 26, went to Kudi Pet Park in Beijing’s Chaoyang Park with his wife and two dogs. Only his wife would walk out alive.

“This used to be a dog amusement park, now it’s a park of horrors,” an eyewitness tells a Beijing TV reporter in the above video.

“The pet park is for dogs to go swimming,” another eyewitness says. “We all raise our dogs like they’re our children, and then this happens!”

What exactly happened?

Around 5 pm, the park had reportedly basically cleared out except for the man, his wife, and their dogs, who were swimming in the pool. All of a sudden, the dogs — a golden retriever and a poodle — went limp. As the man went in to pull them out, he also became lifeless. His wife reached to touch him, and she too passed out.

One eyewitness says she quickly realized that an electric current must have been flowing through the 30-square-meter pool.

While rescuers attempted to revive the man, the wife regained consciousness. The man was sent to a nearby hospital, where — with relatives outside loudly weeping — he was declared dead.

Beijing TV camped out at Kudi Pet Park’s front gate and intercepted two officials as they were leaving in a car. They got out but gave no comment for the camera. We’ll have to wait for more info.

Just two weeks ago, we saw a girl killed by an electric shock from a karaoke parlor’s defective microphone. Now this.

The following picture comes via Shanghai Daily:

A girl was electrocuted on Monday at a KTV parlor in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, according to Dongbei Net.

Li Lingyu, 21, was performing karaoke with friends when eyewitnesses say she suddenly collapsed onto the sofa, dropping her mic. Three classmates who reached out to touch her all felt electric shocks. Another mic-holding classmate was shocked half-numb, and temporarily paralyzed.

Li had neither breath nor heartbeat upon arrival at a local hospital, and was pronounced dead.

The local public security bureau is investigating the case.

According to a classmate, Li was singing Even in Death I’ll Love 《死了都要爱》, a popular Korean folk song rewritten in Mandarin by the Taiwanese band Shin.

On Tuesday, a reporter visited the KTV parlor where the accident happened and was told the maanger was away. Room 110, where Li died, had been sealed, but other rooms were operating normally.

Let this story be yet another reminder of the dangers of electricity. Earlier this month, 23-year-old air stewardess Ma Ailun was killed by an electric current from her recharging iPhone5. A few days later, a Beijing man, 30-year-old Wu Jiantong, was shocked into a coma, also by a recharging iPhone.

(H/T Kevin McGeary)

Torrential rains in Sichuan province have caused flooding in several cities in recent days, leading thousands of militia and reserve troops to be dispatched to the hardest hit areas.

The rains actually began last week, with the worst of it coming down in the last few days. Exact numbers regarding loss of life and property aren’t available yet, but the rains have given us two vivid image of the destruction.

The first comes from yesterday in Jiangyou in western Sichuan, where a 40-year-old bridge collapsed into the Panjiang River.

The Qinglian Bridge is about 200 meters long and 6 meters wide, according to Global Times, and was repaired after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake.

As of noon, three people had been rescued and sent to a local hospital. They are in non-life-threatening conditions, sources said.

The exact number of people who fell into the river and the number of casualties has not yet been verified. Witnesses said a few sedans, a truck and several pedestrians had fallen into the river after the collapse.

Local fire authorities have dispatched 55 rescuers with six steamboats to search a 10-km stretch of the river downstream.

AP adds that six people remain missing.

And then there’s the above video, which is, quite simply, a house being washed away by water. You won’t get a much more vivid illustration of a flood’s power than that. One person was reportedly swept up along with the house.

Bridge collapse:

We’ve never heard of death by shopping cart before, but two days ago in Shanghai, a man brought his own shopping cart to a supermarket, the kind that doesn’t lock into the teeth of reclined moving walkways, and the result was fatal.

The cart was loaded with 15 boxes of soft drinks when it began sliding down an escalator, at the bottom of which was a woman in her 60s. The force of the impact sent the woman flying six to seven meters into the corner of a wall. She immediately lost consciousness and could not be revived at the local hospital.

Shanghai’s Jiading District police are reminding folks to leave their personal trolleys at home. The carts at supermarkets are specially designed to not slide down inclines, because mass times acceleration, etc.

The Jiading case is currently under investigation.

(H/T Reddit)

Horrible and horrible, this story from Global Times, citing a report from Qianjiang Evening News, taking place in Ningbo, Zhejiang province on June 18. We hesitate to begin…

41-year-old driver surnamed Lin, who was issued a driver’s license in May, was practicing backing up her Lexus RX270 SUV into a parking space as her husband directed from behind, when she backed up too far and pinned him against the wall.

That’s bad.

Lin stuck her head out the window upon hearing her husband’s scream, and accelerated in an attempt to move forward.

I don’t like where this is headed.

She however forgot to change gears from reverse to drive, which not only killed him instantly but caused her head to get stuck between the car and a wall along the parking space.

Jesus.

The couple’s 6-year-old daughter saw the entire tragedy unfold from inside the car.

C’est… la vie?

Lin had successfully parked in the space once before that day, but her husband asked her to do it again because she needed the practice.

No more words.

Woman kills husband, self while learning to park (Global Times, h/t James Tiscione)

A 22-year-old man jumped out of a moving bus on a Sichuan province freeway and died, reports Chengdu Business Daily via Global Times. Why did he jump?

“He asked me to park the bus because he needed to pee,” said the bus driver, Liu Renzi, who was en route to Ziyang from Chengdu that day. “I asked him to wait because it’s not safe to park on the freeway. I told him that there was a restroom at Shiqiao service zone, which would take about 10 minutes to reach.”

Ten minutes from a service zone, but the passenger really had to use the bathroom, and 10 minutes was unacceptable.

Liu said that the man, Chen Jie, hit Liu’s head with a plastic water bottle after his request to stop was rejected, then returned to his seat by the left window in the last row. Shortly after, he opened the window and leapt out.

Chen Jie has earned his Darwin Award. The above picture is of his family grieving, but the woman in the middle there may has well be face-palming.

The incident, of course, is the obverse of the one we saw in Shanghai in March, when foreigners forced a driver to pull over so they could pee on the side of the highway.

We may have said this before, but if you really need to relieve yourself, just do it. Open the window and pee out the back or something. No one ever slipped on urine and died (to the best of our knowledge). No one ever saw a man taking a leak and have a heart attack (again, to the best of our knowledge). But now we know: someone has died from jumping out of a bus window because the driver wouldn’t take a pit stop. Now we know.

Around 2 pm yesterday in Wenzhou Commercial City in Lanzhou, Gansu province Zhejiang province, a brother and sister duo rode a motorcycle off the roof of a building, both of them dying in the fall.

Preliminary reports have ruled it an accident. The siblings were practicing how to ride when the driver is said to have lost control.

A reporter was taken to the top of the building via an incline on the other side. The terrace was about 200 square meters, which is not very big at all — about 14 by 14 meters. It was about 15 meters off the ground.

The brother, surnamed Hu, was 27 years old, and his sister was 20. Neither was wearing a helmet.

(H/T James Tiscione)

On May 15, a 24-year-old nurse surnamed Wang was cut in half by an elevator after she found herself pinched between its closing doors.

That sentence is horrific enough, but what about more details?

The victim, a nurse surnamed Wang, was trapped in the elevator in Changhong Tower in Shenzhen’s Luohu district, when it stopped due to failure. Since the door was open the woman attempted to exit, but the elevator started moving again. The elevator fell at least three stories, killing Wang.

Those details are definitely sufficiently horrific, but what about the video?

Watch above. The newscaster says the woman was playing with her cell phone when she got caught between the doors. There were 14 others in the elevator.

The more graphic parts are censored, but you see enough to be able to imagine being inside the elevator when it happens. The gore, the…

Never mind.

Between May 14 and 16, four people died in separate elevator/escaltor accidents in China. Just the day before this Shenzhen incident, an elderly woman was crushed to death when an escalator abruptly broke in a Wal-Mart in Hubei province.

The journalist in the above newscast discovered that the company in charge of the Shenzhen building’s maintenance, Weida Elevator Shenzhen Ltd, had completed an inspection just a few days before, on May 12. One of the building managers went on camera to say that the inspection did not turn up any problems.

So what happened?

Further inquiry at Weida was met with “no comment.”

“The brands of the elevator involved in the two accidents were not mentioned in Chinese media report,” Sina noted in an article last week.

Full newscast:

The accident happened at Kervan Orient Express just after 8 pm when the three-year-old boy, playing with a seven-year-old girl, fell down and “touched the partition screen, which fell and hit him in the head,” according to Shanghai Daily.

The partition is taller than an adult, about 2 meters long, made of glass and wood and “quite heavy,” according to a waiter who declined to be named.

The restaurant manager, Sun Ying, reportedly called an ambulance at 8:10, but decided to hail a taxi because “they feared an ambulance would take too long.” The “they” presumably includes the restaurant owner and the boy’s mother, who, along with Sun, accompanied the injured boy to the nearest hospital. It’s unknown how long they waited for this ambulance that Sun reportedly called.

The first hospital said it could not treat the boy’s injuries, so he was rushed via private car to a second hospital, which also lacked the proper equipment. In what can only be described as a nightmare scenario, at 9 pm — 50 minutes after the first ambulance was called — the boy was “declared dead after waiting for an ambulance that never came.”

That last phrase, again, is via Shanghai Daily, citing “the restaurant staff who accompanied the boy and his mother.”

It’s unclear if the second ambulance they called, from the second hospital, ever arrived, even after the boy was pronounced dead.

British boy injured at eatery died waiting as ambulance never came (Shanghai Daily)

The suffering and grief that accompanies the loss of an only-child is already unimaginable, but what about the loss of two children, in the same place, five years apart, to the same natural disaster? Lu Jingkang, 50, has lost both her children: her son in 2008 to the Wenchuan earthquake, and her daughter on Saturday in the Ya’an earthquake, both occurring along the Longmenshan fault in Sichuan province

“God has been too harsh on me, way too harsh,” Lu told the Yangtse Evening Post on Sunday in incredible understatement, as relayed by SCMP.

Lu said she had never fully recovered from the tremendous grief after losing her son in 2008. Her daughter gave her the only solace over the years.

The teenage girl had written in her diary once: “There is already too much weeping at home. I won’t cry anymore… [and I] shall become Mum’s mainstay,” the Post reported.

If there is fairness in the universe, luck and happiness and life’s melange of tender and good, it comes at the incredible cost of calamity borne by individuals such as Lu, counterweight to weight. Somewhere in the rubble, a child is born, and he will prosper. There is no other comfort.

Mother loses son, then daughter in both Sichuan earthquakes (SCMP)