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We feel deeply sorry for the death of eight students in a stampede on Monday night at a middle school in the city of Xiangxiang, Central China's Hunan province. There is nothing we can do to bring back the lost lives, but there is something we can and must do to prevent similar disasters.

There is, of course, a gnawing feeling of what-ifs: What if the staircase of the school building were built much wider? The building does have three other staircases but the students swarmed through this one simply because it was raining outside and it was the nearest to their dorms. What if teachers had paid enough attention to the safety of students and supervised the evacuation when it was raining hard? What if the students had received enough training for evacuating a building in an emergency?

In the design of school buildings, particular attention must be paid to the safe evacuation of students in an emergency. In the several school stampedes that have taken place in the past couple of years, narrow staircases were seen as the direct culprit. An investigation is needed to find out whether staircases in all school buildings are safe enough for the evacuation of students.

If classes are organized in the evening for students to study on their own in school buildings, their evacuation from the building must be well organized by teachers on duty. If only students in this school had been prepared to leave the building in an orderly manner, such a tragedy could have never occurred.

An investigation into this disaster should find out whether any teacher was meant to be on duty. If so, where was the teacher when the accident took place? If the teacher was not there, the responsible leader must be punished for dereliction of duty.

They could learn from a school headmaster in Sichuan province who ensured that students were trained to evacuate the school building in a safe and efficient manner in an emergency. The regular training paid off. Not a single student in the school was even injured in the deadly earthquake that shook the province in May last year.

Last but not the least, teachers and parents have the obligation to teach their students and children survival skills during an emergency. Education in this regard needs to be made compulsory for primary and middle school students.

Hopefully, this tragedy will be a lesson that other schools can learn from and do what they need to make their schools safe.

(China Daily 12/09/2009 page8)