What do you do when a demolition crew starts knocking down the room in the middle of an X-ray procedure?

Well, if you're a patient: Run.

“I was doing an X-ray on a patient when a big hole was dug in the wall," Liu Chunguang, director of the radiology department at the Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University in Henan Province, told the The Shanghai Daily.



"The patient was frightened by the rumbling noises and ran away, shouting 'earthquake, earthquake'."

If you are a hospital staffer, you probably try to save valuable equipment from bureaucratic idiocy. Three doctors tried to hold back the demolition derby, which damaged medical equipment and buried the morgue, and the six bodies in it, but they were injured in scuffles with workers, hospital official Yuan Fang reported to Xinhua.

"We wanted to enter but they prevented us from entering. They beat our deputy secretary of the Party committee, a driver of the emergency department and a doctor. The three are injured," said Yuan.

The workers were dressed in military fatigues, according to ABC news in Australia.

The core of the problem, apparently, was a local government that wanted to expand a roadway and allegedly had warned the hospital of its demolition plans. Government officials stated that they had advised the hospital that the room and morgue were on land slated for demolition, and asked the hospital staff to take the rooms apart on their own, according to the BBC.

According to Professor Wang Jingbo at the China University of Political Science and Law, the work needed to follow the law, which it allegedly did not.

"Demolition must follow legal procedures and property owners have the right to present and defend their case," he told China Radio International (CRI). "Only in this way can we say the demolition is legally sanctioned. For the illegal buildings, administrative organs can demolish them forcibly; for the legal ones, demolition enforcement authorities must get the approval from the court based on house expropriation and compensation rules."

An investigation is ongoing and at this point the deputy director of the Huiji district bureau responsible for the hospital relocation has been sacked, according to CRI.

"No matter whether the buildings are legal or not, it is illegal to break them down violently without considering the safety of hospital staff and patients," noted Wang. "So the loss brought by the breakdown must be compensated. Personnel and authorities involved must be punished."

According to the radio news service, the local authorities and the hospital have reached a tentative resolution regarding compensation.

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