AsianFin — A mushroom cloud of dust and debris engulfed the streets of Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, as a 31-story building tumbled just like toy blocks in about five seconds. Terrified people fled for their lives, screaming and rushing to their cars.
Construction workers wearing hard hats and bright orange safety jackets were consumed by the dust as the concrete structure came crashing down, leaving dozens trapped under the rubble.
Rescue workers, overwhelmed by the massive mound of debris and twisted metal, worked frantically just meters away from the busy Chatuchak Market, Asia’s largest market by area.
The collapsed building is over 1,000 kilometers away from the epicenter of a 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Myanmar on Friday that killed over 1,000 people and injured thousands more, while buildings closer to the epicenter in neighboring countries like Laos and China suffered merely cracks. The under-construction building is one of the few buildings that crumbled in Bangkok, while many decades-old high-rise buildings remain intact.
Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister Phumtham Wechayachai confirmed on Friday afternoon that 81 people were trapped, and three had already been declared dead.
A report indicated that around 400 people, including Thai and foreign workers, were present at the construction site. The injured were being rushed to nearby hospitals for treatment.
The building, situated on Kamphaeng Phet Road, was a 2.1-billion-baht (about 62 million dollars) project. Construction started in 2020 but was suspended during the pandemic and resumed later. It was about 30% complete before the crash, with construction having reached the highest floor, said Sutthipong Boonnithi, the spokesperson and deputy director of the State Audit Office, who was on the construction site.
The main contractor for the project is ITD-CREC, a joint venture between Italian-Thai Development Plc (51%), a listed company in Thailand, and China Railway No. 10 Engineering (Thailand) (49%), a subsidiary of a state-owned enterprise based in Jinan, eastern China’s Shandong province. The inspection duties fell to a consortium made up of PN Synchroniz, W and Associates Group, and KP Consultants and Management, Sutthipong noted.
ITD, or Italian-Thailand Development Public Company Limited, founded in August 1958, was listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand in August 1994. Its stock price plunged by 3.7% on Friday after the collapse of the building.
The deputy prime minister said that the earthquake on Friday was unprecedented in Bangkok over the past 100 years, requiring extensive follow-up measures.
“Surveys will need to be conducted on hospitals, schools, and temples to check for cracks or unstable structures that might be at risk of collapse,” he said. “Bangkok’s vulnerability is concerning, given the soft, muddy land. Preliminary inspections have revealed multiple areas with cracked buildings.”
The video clips of the quick collapse of the building went viral on China’s social media, making many doubt the way the Chinese SOE does business in overseas markets.
A Better Building Technique or a Way of Cutting Corners?
The completion of the skeleton of the government building used to be a source of pride for China Railway No. 10. When the highest floor of the building was completed in April 2024, the company posted an article on its website, calling the building the company’s signature project in Thailand. The company believed that it would bring in more contracts in Thailand, given that the high quality of the building could serve as a “business card” in the country.
Employees of China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group were celebrating the completion of the building's skeleton in 2024.
Immediately after the earthquake, the article was taken down from the website. Many netizens are now wondering what caused the building to tumble so fast and so completely, while others are defending the Chinese SOE by blaming local subcontractors for construction techniques or concrete grades. All videos or articles criticizing the SOE disappeared from the internet in China.
A research paper on the adoption of a simplified construction model for the Thai building betrays the inconvenient fact of the lack of beams in the building.
The paper, titled Construction Techniques for an Ultra-High Beamless Building in a Foreign Country, explains how the beamless building is constructed, with the 137-meter Thai government building as the sole subject. The keywords for the paper include Road and Belt Initiative, Beamless Building, High-rise, and Quality Control. The paper, authored by Zou Wen, an engineer employed by China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group, was published in the June 2024 issue of Architecture Sciences, an industry publication in China.
The paper shed light on the problem of the building’s structure that led to its collapse: there are no beams. Many architects who viewed the video clips of the collapse argued that a structure without steel beams makes the building vulnerable to winds and seismic forces.
An experienced architect, who preferred to go by the alias Peter, told AsianFin that buildings without steel or steel/concrete beams are occasionally used in basements, but never in a high-rise building. “It came as a big surprise to me that the 30-story Bangkok building did not have a horizontal supporting beam.”
Another architect, surnamed Zhang, pointed to another factor that could have caused the tragedy. “Buildings in China are required to survive a 6 to 9 magnitude earthquake depending on the location, but in Bangkok the standard is resistance to 5-magnitude quakes. The safety requirement in Thailand is lax compared to that in China,” Zhang said, adding that government regulation and supervision of earthquake-related safety requirements are less strict in the Southeast Asian country.
On social media RedNote, some professionals in architecture and civil engineering highlighted the lack of welding of vertical columns with the steel/concrete floor to support floors, walls, and roofs of buildings. Steel frame structures are used to form the ‘skeletal frame’ which a building is then constructed around.
What May Happen to the JV of ITD and China Railway?
The fallout of the collapse is likely to cast a shadow on another project secured by the joint venture of ITD and China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group.
ITD announced in July 2023 that its joint venture with China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group secured a 9.34 billion baht contract for the high-speed rail project linking Bangkok and Nong Khai. The contract, signed with the State Railway of Thailand, covers the construction of key infrastructure for the Bangkok-Nakhon Ratchasima section, which is part of the larger Thailand-China High-Speed Railway initiative.
The project includes the development of over 30 kilometers of railway structure, with both at-grade and elevated segments. Work will also include the relocation of existing rail systems, road improvements, and the construction of vital railway bridges and drainage systems. The construction is expected to take about three years, with a completion deadline set for 1,080 days.
The Thailand-China high-speed railway is about 35.7% complete, with full completion and operations in 2028.
China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group is part of Shanghai-listed China Railway Construction Corporation, a state-owned holding company. It has been one of Fortune Global 500 companies and ranked 43nd in the Fortune Global 500 list in 2022. China Railway No. 10 has credentials for building railways, bridges, tunnels, civil engineering and electrical equipment installation among many others. China Railway No. 10 employs 14,237 employees, including nearly 300 top-level constructors.
