Frequently I say in my blogs to always keep your eyes open when you are in China, because you never know what you might see next. Well, this time I am suggesting you keep your eyes open, because you don’t want to get hurt! Construction on the roads in China is not done quite the same way and with the same safety precautions that we are used to.
As you can see in the picture below, this street had a construction project of some sort in progress, but someone forgot to put out some markers to prevent people from getting too close to the hole. To make matters even worse, it was at night.
I am impressed by how straight the lines are where the workers dug out the dirt. As you can see from the next picture, it looks like the workers dug the hole with shovels, and then the dirt was stacked near the hole so it can be used to fill the hole when the project was completed. If heavy equipment had been used to dig the hole, I think there would only be a couple of large stacks of dirt, not the dirt surrounding the hole in smaller piles. Labor is less expensive in China, so it is common to see a project like this done with manual labor.
This project was going on very near the entrance to a new restaurant that opened across a busy street from a shopping area, and behind that was a large neighborhood. I don’t know how long the hole remained, but hopefully it wasn’t very long.
So, keep your eyes open!