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Blame put on management and practices

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Sloppy project management and negligent building practices have led to the poor quality of bridges and other mainland infrastructure, civil engineers said yesterday.

Factors from accidents to weather changes could cause a bridge to fail, a lecturer at Tongji University's civil engineering school in Shanghai said.

The Fenghuang county bridge collapse was probably the result of mistakes made by workers erecting or dismantling steel scaffolding without appropriate guidance, he said. The dismantling was probably done before the concrete had time to set.

The lecturer said he was unsurprised to hear about the accident, particularly as it was in the poor hinterland where there were more substandard projects than in the more developed southeast.

'The level of architectural design on the mainland is almost shoulder to shoulder with the west, but we lag far behind in terms of construction and management,' he said.

He said companies that won bids often outsourced work to small, informal teams that offered to finish the projects for an extremely low price.

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