By Tom Hancock

After three large bridges collapse in a single month, Chinese internet users say “I told you so”.

A complete section of the Wuyi mountain bridge in Fujian Province collapsed on July 15, killing a bus driver and injuring 22 bus passengers. The following day, gaps appeared in the middle section of the third Qianjiang River Bridge in Hangzhou, injuring a truck driver.

Earlier this month, a bridge in Binhai county, Jiangsu province partially collapsed, causing two trucks to fall into a river below the bridge.

Injured people on the Wuyi mountain bridge, Fujian.

All three bridges were built in the mid-to-late 1990s. The Qianjiang bridge in Hangzhou was refurbished in 2005, but minutes from a meeting of the local transportation bureau showed that an incorrect ratio of sand to concrete was used in the maintenance, according to the China Daily newspaper.

Internet users predicted the collapse of the Qianjiang bridge several years ago. As early as 2007, posts on popular internet forum Tianya pointed out that the ratio of sand to concrete used to build the bridge was incorrect, according to the Beijing News. Other posts to the forum pointed out that the bridge was built by the same company responsible for a collapsed bridge in Hunan province, and advised drivers to avoid crossing the bridge.

Low quality infrastructure may be caused by corruption amongst officials responsible for overseeing construction projects. The China Daily reports that Zhao Zhanqi, an official responsible for the Qianjiang bridge project, was sentence to life in jail in 2007 for taking over 6 million yuan in bribes during the bidding for the bridge project and during its construction.

The world’s longest ocean bridge, spanning 23 miles, opened in Qingdao, Shandong province last month. Chinese internet users soon complained about the rushed construction of the bridge, after pictures of easily loosened bolts and incomplete safety rails along the bridge were posted online. Last year a bridge in Henan province collapsed, killing 37 people.

The frequency of bridge collapses in China leads to an attitude of cynicism among some sections of the public. “If the bridges didn’t collapse, how else could we rebuild them and boost our GDP?”, wrote one commentator on Chinese news website Caixin.