China accidentally blocks highway with new apartment buildings

Chinese officials were forced to cut this motorway in half to go around a block of flats after the building was accidentally erected in its path before the road was built. [Photo: Courtesy]

-Adapted from Daily Mail

Blundering Chinese officials were forced to cut a motorway in half to go around a block of flats after they accidentally erected the building in its proposed path then realised it would cost too much to relocate the tenants.

According to Daily Mail, construction workers had to squeeze the eight-lane highway into four and subsequently left furious residents stuck in the middle of a busy road.

They had just been moved from their previous homes to make way for a park so refused to move again unless they were heavily compensated.

So the council decided to save a small fortune by leaving the flats in place.

Resident Shing Su, who lives in the block in Xi’an, Shaanxi province in western China, said: 'We all lived in another area where they were building the Daming National Heritage Park and they promised to put us up in a new, modern block of flats, so we ended up here.

'But we had only been here a few months when they found that they had built one block too many, and that it was on the place where there was supposed to be a new highway.'

The council then started negotiations with the tenants, but with their new, modern flats they wanted even more compensation, and after several months of failed negotiations, the council simply gave up and built around the problem.

But the road has been branded a waste of time and money as it has done little to solve the problem of rush-hour congestion that it was designed to solve.

Mr Shing added: 'We don't exactly like being stuck out in the middle of a 60metre-wide highway, but you get used to it.

'If they make a decent offer most would move, but it's hard as it seems we had only settled here when we were asked to move.'

It is not the first time a blunder or a dispute has led to bizarre construction projects in China.

In December, an ancestral grave was left standing in the middle of a building site because the family of the deceased refuse to let it be moved.

The single gravestone was left on top of a ten metre high mound while workers erected a high-end block of flats around it in Taiyuan, capital of northern China's Shanxi Province.

The tomb is the ancestral grave of a villager from nearby Longbao whose family is unhappy with the level of relocation compensation that has been offered.

Last year, Chinese workers famously had to build a motorway around a single house when the owners refused to relocate.

Luo Baogen and his wife insisted on living in the half-demolished building in the city of Wenling, in Zhejiang province, because they believe that the compensation offered by the government to move was not enough.

However, the house was finally pulled down after the couple reportedly accepted an increased offer of compensation from £22,000 to £26,000.

Meanwhile. a furious family took legal action against property developers in Mianyang, south west China, last year after they demolished every staircase in their seven-storey apartment block in a bizarre bid to make them vacate their top-floor flat so they could build a factory.