Buildings of a half-dozen other logistics companies were destroyed in the blasts, and more than 1,000 new Renault cars were left charred in a nearby parking lot, Doane reports.
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Xinhua said several containers caught fire beforehand. The death toll has climbed to 50 but is expected to rise, while over 700 people have been hospitalized.
The official Xinhua News agency said an initial explosion triggered other blasts at nearby businesses.
There were no indications of what caused the blasts and no immediate signs of any large release of toxic chemicals into the air.
Authorities also said they have lost contact with 36 firefighters at the scene and 12 of them have been confirmed as among the dead.
Seventeen fire-fighters were among those killed in the horror in Tianjin, over 100 km from here, while 70 of those injured are in critical condition.
Those filming scream and shout in fright, with the woman asking: “Are we unsafe here?”
“I’m wearing this mask because I saw some police wearing them, but I also saw some without masks”.
“I’m not afraid, it’s just a scratch”, she said, but added her mother was injured badly.
Hours after the blasts, plumes of smoke are still visible in the air.
“The fireball was huge, maybe as much as 100 meter tall”, said 27-year-old Huang Shiting, who lives close to the site.
Tianjin, China- You can see the devastation everywhere: in the hollowed-out shells of barely-standing buildings, in the anguished faces of relatives waiting for news of loved ones, in the parade of scorched cars.
“According to the Tianjin Tanggu Environmental Monitoring Station, hazardous chemicals stored by the company concerned include sodium cyanide (NaCN), toluene diisocyanate (TDI) and calcium carbide (CaC2), all of which pose direct threats to human health on contact”.
But the warehouse was a transit point and authorities do not have a clear picture of what was there at the time of the blasts.
Gao Huaiyou, deputy director of Tianjin’s work safety watchdog, told reporters that there were major discrepancies between the accounts of company managers and customs officials.
However, the Tianjin government suspended further firefighting efforts to allow a team of chemicals experts to survey hazardous materials at the site.
“Many types of different materials with different characteristics are mixed together and could at any time result in a chemical reaction or explosion“.
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But the head of Tianjin’s Environment Protection Bureau said that while poisonous and harmful chemicals have been detected in the air, they were not at excessively high levels.
