An accident site in Ho Chi Minh City after a 30-meter section of a tower crane fell and injured seven people

Building site accidents, power line mishaps and careless roadwork are killing more members of the public in Ho Chi Minh City than ever before.

The victims in the city’s worst year on record include a small child who fell into an open manhole, a preteen electrocuted while playing football in an alley, and a motorist crushed by a falling concrete beam.

However, rather than the local authorities, Vietnam’s Penal Code could be the real culprit as it only covers crimes by individuals, not organizations.

This was seen recently when police decided against initiating criminal proceedings in connection with the manhole incident early this year that killed a seven-year-old boy.

Instead, they forwarded the case to the Department of Transport for administrative action despite the project owner’s admission of responsibility.

More recently, 11-year-old La Van Hau of Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province was found dead at 6 a.m. on September 27 with his hand still gripping a wire fence.

According to police, Hau was using a slingshot to shoot birds when he touched the fence, which had been electrified by leakage from the power line to his neighbor’s house.

Only 11 hours later, ten-year-old Tran Trung Huy of HCMC’s District 6 was electrocuted in an alley while playing football in the rain.

Huy’s friends immediately called his parents, who rushed to the scene and took the boy to District 6 Hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Then on September 30, a massive concrete beam fell from a up-high and crushed a car traveling past a construction site on Nguyen Van Linh Street in District 7, killing a woman and seriously injuring two members of her family.

The 10.7-meter beam weighing more than more four tons was being lifted by a crane when the hook broke.

An employee of the China-owned How Yu Construction Vietnam Company, which is building a tunnel from Phu My Bridge to Nguyen Van Linh Street, says he saw the beam drop onto the Honda Civic and flatten it.

Sloppy investigation

Former public prosecutor Hoang Xuan Son maintains that criminal charges are warranted in cases like these.

Identifying the parties responsible is the duty of the police as the primary investigators, and their failure to do so is unacceptable, Son says.

In each case, they should work out the exact cause of the accident and the person or persons responsible.

“The investigators are not doing their duty and merely complain that it’s too hard,” says Son.

“How can this be when they have no trouble working out who should be charged with what when it’s a murder case with more than one perpetrator?”

Public prosecutor Vo Van Them says police investigators have been reluctant to handle the recent cases because of their inexperience, and points out that his office can override the police and press criminal charges anyway.

Truong Xuan Tam of the Vietnam Lawyers Confederation is alarmed by the situation.

“We’re seeing more and more of these fatal and preventable accidents, and they are ringing alarm bells. Only handling them as crimes can act as a deterrent,” says Tam.

Legal loopholes

City lawyer Phan Dang Thanh thinks the Penal Code should apply to organizations as well as individuals in its entirety.

“Of course it is impossible to imprison an entity but there should be stiffer penalties than just revoking a license or imposing a fine.”

As it stands, the code does outlaw some construction and management practices, Thanh says.

For example, Article 203 allows criminal proceedings to be taken against road repairers who place dangerous barriers or leave potholes behind.

After a building, bridge or road is built or repaired, Thanh says, the project managers can be held criminally responsible for fatalities that result from their negligence.

Trouble is, it’s hard to determine the individuals responsible as it’s normal practice for more than one worker to be assigned a particular task. Job demarcation is rare at construction sites.

The problem is compounded by the inevitability of contractors blaming each other when something goes drastically wrong and a passer-by dies.

Reported by Phuong Thanh