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SEG Plaza in China wobbles, causes panic in downtown Shenzhen
SEG Plaza, a nearly 300 m (980 ft) skyscraper in Shenzhen's Futian district was evacuated on Tuesday after it began to shake, sending panicked shoppers running for safety in the southern town of Shenzhen.
The SEG Plaza uncontrollably started to wobble at about 1 pm, urging an evacuation of people inside while pedestrians looked at it, surprised from the streets outside. The skyscraper was closed as of 2:40 pm, according to local media broadcasts.
The skyscraper was developed in 2000 and is home to a significant electronics market and several offices in the downtown of one of China's fastest-growing cities.
As per a post on the Twitter-like Weibo site, emergency management officials are investigating what caused the skyscraper in Shenzhen's Futian district to shake.
The statement stated that after examining and analysing the data of various earthquake monitoring stations over the city, there was no earthquake in Shenzhen.
In a later report, the district said that everyone inside was evacuated safely. Also, experts had found no cracks in the ground surrounding the skyscraper, and no pieces of outer wall had dropped or been destroyed.
It was not instantly clear how experts would manage a dangerous tower of its scale in the heart of a city of over 12 million people.
Spectator videos posted by local media on Weibo showed the skyscraper shaking on its foundations as hundreds of scared pedestrians rushed outside.
One Weibo user in a caption wrote that SEG has been completely evacuated, and wrote a video of hundreds of people milling about on a broad shopping square near the tower.
The skyscraper's name is kept after the semiconductor and electronics producer, Shenzhen Electronics Group, whose offices are based in the complex. It is the 18th tallest tower in Shenzhen, as per the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat skyscraper database.
Last year, the Chinese authorities banned the construction of skyscrapers taller than 500 m, adding to height restrictions already implemented in some cities like Beijing.
Five of the world's tallest skyscrapers are built in China, including the world's second-tallest building, the Shanghai Tower, which is 632 m.
Shenzhen is an extending city in southern China, close to Hong Kong, which has a prospering homegrown tech manufacturing view. Many Chinese tech companies, including Tencent and Huawei, have selected the city to host their headquarters. It is also home to the world's fourth-tallest skyscraper, Ping An Finance Centre of, 599 m.
Building breakdowns are not rare in China, where lax building standards and breakneck urbanisation head to constructions giving up in haste.
Last year in May, a five-storey quarantine hotel in the south-eastern city of Quanzhou fell due to poor construction, killing 29 people.
The destructive 2008 Sichuan earthquake led to over 69,000 deaths. The disaster ignited a storm of public controversy over defectively constructed school buildings, dubbed 'tofu dregs', which fell, killing thousands of students.
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