Beijing Olympics organizers have shifted into hyperdrive. Games-related press conferences and other media events are being laid on thick and fast by BOCOG (the acronym for the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games).
Wednesday they corralled an array of experts to field media questions about the latest Olympics-related weather news. Ho-hum, you might say. And in any other country this might not be exactly a headline-grabber. But in pollution-plagued Beijing, authorities are scrambling to perfect ways to change the weather – yup, the press is hot on the heels of a unit with the Orwellian title of the Weather Modification Office. Its scientists acknowledged they have techniques to “stop the rain” – or “rain mitigation”, as they call it -- for special events like, say, the Summer Olympics opening ceremony on Aug. 8, 2008. (Beijing’s notoriously muggy rainy season begins in July.)
Access to Beijing’s cloud-seeding bases are so much in demand that the capital’s weather czars decided to discourage such press trips. Turns out Beijing’s weather modifiers are too busy giving interviews when they should be perfecting their wild and wonderful methods for taming Mother Nature in time for the Olympics. (I must say, years ago I enjoyed interviewing a weather-modification cadre at a cloud-seeding base in the Western Hills; she confessed she might have lost her job if rain hadn’t subsided on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic; that day in 1999 the rain stopped about an hour before the big National Day parade.)
On Monday the story of the day was the number of casualties suffered by laborers working on Olympic venues. Earlier the Sunday Times had alleged Beijing was covering up at least ten deaths by laborers killed in construction accidents while working on the National Stadium.
BOCOG shot down the story, claimed an excellent safety record at all its venues, and repeatedly stressed there had been no major accidents during their construction. But with two press events on Monday – the morning’s formal opening of the “water cube” aquatics center, and a BOCOG press conference in the afternoon – the question was sure to come up.
I tried my luck at the “water cube”. “How many workers died here during construction?” I asked Li Aiqing, president of the Beijing State-Owned Assets management Co. He paused for a moment – a tell-tale sign, and I made a mental note to delve into what that pause meant. Then he answered, “We didn’t have any major accidents.”
(The cube seems really cool, by the way, with shimmering walls made out of what looks like gigantic sheets of Teflon-like bubble wrap. Only when you get inside do you notice that Beijing’s notorious sand and dust have left a thin veneer on the translucent walls. Li was asked at least five times about the grime. “We’ll do better to make it cleaner and prettier,” he insisted, “We’ve just opened and the construction environment has been quite dusty.”)
You might think that Li had meant nobody died in the “water cube’s” construction. But that’s not necessarily the case. In the afternoon BOCOG presser, journalists asked another batch of officials how many migrant workers had died during construction of all the Olympic venues, citing the Sunday Times report alleging ten or more workers had been killed in National Stadium construction accidents alone. Deng Zhenkuan, deputy chief of Beijing’s Bureau of Work Safety, first denied the Sunday Times article, then acknowledged that two workers had died (one in 2006 and one in 2007) and a couple had been injured during the building of the National Stadium, also known as the “bird’s nest” because of its distinctive lattice-work of steel girders.
Of course, that just made everyone clamor to know more. What about ALL the Games venues? By this time Ding and other senior officials were filing out of the press conference hall. Some BOCOG staff, plus a couple representatives from Hill and Knowlton (hired by BOCOG as its PR consultant), ran after them for clarification. A few minutes later Ding re-appeared. By this time all the official interpreters had left; a bilingual H&K rep was recruited to translate.
Looking uncomfortable, Ding clarified that a total of six workers had died during construction on all the Games venues, one had been seriously injured and three had received light injuries. He explained there were different classifications of injury and explained, “It’s classified a major accident if there are more than three fatalities.” Then he disappeared again.
Hey, wait a minute! Was it six deaths over three years? Or five years? BOCOG and H&K staff once again huddled with Ding and others behind closed doors. They emerged with another giblet of information: the six deaths was over the past five years.
And that was how Monday's story of the Olympic construction accidents got out -- piecemeal, like the proverbial "death by a thousand cuts". But at least the media didn't run into any "major accidents" trying to winkle information out of authorities. Now, that wasn't so painful, was it?
