Workplace and road accidents have happened frequently during the May Day holiday, casting grief to many families as the week-long vacation nears its end.

Three major accidents on Thursday alone claimed 11 lives and wounded 14 in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, Central China's Hunan Province and Beijing.

In Tongchuan of Shaanxi, six were killed and one injured on Thursday afternoon when a Hyundai SUV careened off a 14-metre-high bridge on an expressway connecting Xi'an and Huangling.

Almost at the same time, another five lost their lives, leaving the remaining six seriously injured when a minivan crashed in Ningxiang County in Hunan. The 11 people from four families were in a tour in the mini-bus, which had a designed capacity of holding seven people. Three kids and one pregnant woman were among them, according to a report released by the State Administration of Work Safety.

Meanwhile, in Beijing's Haidian District on Thursday, seven workers were severely burned at a paint-coating workshop when a bottle of inflammable material was ignited. The workers suffered severe burn injuries on their legs but all are in stable condition, said sources with a military hospital where they were treated.

Also on Thursday, a group of 28 students and their parents successfully escaped from a bus that caught fire when they were returning to Tongling from Bengbu in East China's Anhui Province after a school tennis game.

The work safety committee under the State Council on Thursday issued an emergency circular calling for tighter supervision to prevent more accidents in the remaining days of the May Day holiday.

Twenty-four had been killed from Monday to Wednesday in road accidents caused by improper driving and loading, the committee said.

Since May 1, accidents in collieries, mines, roads, water and air have been frequently reported.

Floods caused by the sudden burst of the dyke of a gold mine's dross pool on Sunday had inundated 40 rooms, 20 hectares of farmland and 1,000 trees in Zhen'an County, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province, leading to economic losses of 1.6 million yuan (US$200,000), officials said.

The search for 17 people who had gone missing in the county is still going on, said Wang Fuqin, an official in the county's work safety office. The task is proving to be difficult because it is still unknown when and where these people had gone missing, he said.

Moreover, 10 fishermen from Dalian remained missing on Friday after their fishing boat collided with a heavily-loaded oil tanker on Tuesday in the Yellow Sea.

In Guizhou, 14 miners died in a gas blast in an illegal coal mine late on Tuesday.

(China Daily 05/06/2006 page2)