The death toll from the bridge collapse in Central China's Hunan Province has risen to 41, rescuers said yesterday.

The 328-m-long, 42-m-high Tuojiang River bridge in Fenghuang County, in the western part of Hunan Province, collapsed on Monday afternoon when an estimated 123 workers were dismantling its steel scaffolding.

Sixty-four workers escaped or were rescued, while rescuers are still searching for the roughly two-dozen victims thought to still be buried by the debris.

And four of the five severely injured people were out of danger yesterday. Altogether 22 people were injured.

Experts said the chances of finding any more survivors are slim.

Investigation teams and experts have blamed design flaws and quality defects in the bridge's structure and materials.

"The ruptured parts of the bridge contain broken stones, and also it was a clean break. It's obvious the quality was too poor," the Beijing News quoted an architecture expert at Beijing's Tsinghua university as saying.

Surviving construction workers said work on the bridge had been rushed and that they had been ordered to take the scaffolding down before the bridge was finished.

"Beforehand, we said that such a poor-quality stone arch bridge would one day have an accident. We never thought it would topple before it was finished," the paper quoted a worker as saying.

Another said no safety harnesses were provided on scaffolding "tens of meters high" and that workers' safety helmets were so flimsy that holes could be poked in them with fingers.

China's top safety chief, Li Yizhong, leading a cabinet-appointed probe, said administrative failures were also to blame.

"The painful lesson ... is that acute dangers existed before the accident. Relevant work units and personnel did not inspect or detect (the dangers), let alone take effective measures," said Li.

More than 1,500 rescue workers were picking through the debris to find the missing.

Police had detained a construction manager and a project supervisor a day after the bridge broke apart like a piece of "bean curd", State media said, quoting a rescuer.

One of the contractors building the bridge also worked on a bridge that fell apart two months ago, local media reported yesterday.

On June 15, a section of the 1,600-m Jiujiang bridge, connecting Foshan and Heshan over the Xijiang River in neighboring Guangdong Province, collapsed after a barge laden with sand crashed into it, causing several cars and pedestrians to fall into the river below.

Investigators detained the captain and five other suspects. The bridge was deemed structurally sound.

(Xinhua News Agency August 17, 2007)