https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/c...ollapses-trapping-dozens-20200308-p547w5.html Shanghai: Dozens of people are trapped after a five-storey hotel being used for coronavirus quarantine collapsed in the port city of Quanzhou in southeast China, state media said. About four hours after the collapse, the Quanzhou municipality said 38 of the 70 or so people who had been in the Quanzhou Xinjia Hotel had been rescued. A live video stream posted by the government-backed Beijing News site showed rescue workers in orange overalls clambering over mounds of rubble and carrying people towards ambulances gathered around the site. Beijing News said the Quanzhou Xinjia Hotel had been five storeys high. It collapsed about 7.30pm local time and 34 people were rescued in the following two hours, the Quanzhou municipality said on its website. No reason was given for the collapse. A man is assisted out from the rubble of the collapsed hotel building. Credit:Chinatopix via AP "I was at a gas station and heard a loud noise. I looked up and the whole building collapsed. Dust was everywhere, and glass fragments were flying around," a witness said in a video posted on the Miaopai streaming app. "I was so terrified that my hands and legs were shivering." A woman named only by her surname, Chen, told the Beijing News website that relatives including her sister had been under quarantine at the hotel as prescribed by local regulations after returning from Hubei province, the centre of the coronavirus outbreak. She said they had arrived on February 25 and had been scheduled to leave soon after completing their 14 days of quarantine. Rescuers evacuate an injured person from the rubble of a collapsed hotel building in Quanzhou city. Credit: "I can't contact them. They're not answering their phones," she said. "I'm under quarantine too (at another hotel) and I'm very worried, I don't know what to do. They were healthy, they took their temperatures every day, and the tests showed that everything was normal." The official People's Daily said the hotel had opened in June 2018 with 80 rooms. Beijing News' video stream was viewed by more than 2 million Weibo users on Saturday evening, and the hotel's collapse was the top trending topic on the Weibo site, China's close equivalent to Twitter. Rescuers work at the site of a collapsed five-story hotel building in Quanzhou city in southeast China's Fujian province. Credit:Chinatopix Via AP Some users demanded an investigation into how the hotel could have collapsed. The municipality said 36 emergency rescue vehicles such as cranes and excavators, 67 firefighting vehicles, 15 ambulances, and more than 700 firefighters, medical and other rescue workers were at the scene as the operation stretched into the night. Quanzhou is a port city on the Taiwan Strait in the province of Fujian with a population of more than 8 million. The Fujian provincial government said that as of Friday, the province had 296 cases of coronavirus and 10,819 people had been placed under observation after being classified as suspected close contacts.
The virus got really really hot as it gathered on the load-bearing beams of the structure, and caused structural failure.