New explosions and fire rocked the Chinese port city of Tianjin on Saturday, where one survivor was pulled out and authorities ordered evacuations within a 3-kilometer (1.8-mile) radius to clean up chemical contamination. A blast at an auto parts factory in eastern China killed 75 people a year ago when a room filled with metal dust exploded.
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In an emergency notice, the State Council Work Safety Commission said the deadly blasts at the warehouse storing unsafe chemicals revealed a lack of safety awareness among businesses and lax implementation of safety regulations. However, Greenpeace released a statement saying chemicals stored by the company could react violently with water and cause more explosions.
At least 700 people were injured, more than 71 seriously, the Tianjin government said on its Weibo microblog, and the official Xinhua news agency said two fires were still burning.
The official Xinhua newsagency has said several containers in the warehouse caught fire before the explosions.
More than 1,000 firefighters, including 232 from neighboring Hebei province, remain on the scene, said Zhou Tian, the municipal firefighting bureau chief. Shockwaves from the explosions were felt by residents in apartment blocks miles kilometers away in the city of 15 million people.
While that’s equivalent to nearly 50 percent of the monthly polyethylene imports through Tianjin, Pang expects the impact of the explosions on the overall chemical supply chain in China to be minor.
It is followed seconds later by a shockwave that sends debris shooting towards the camera, knocking the man holding it backwards as a fiery mushroom cloud shoots up, filling the air with fireballs and smoke.
The warehouse that caused the explosion is owned by the Tanjin Dongjiang Port Rui Hai worldwide company and its officers have been placed under arrest.
“There was no chance to escape, and that’s why the casualties were so severe”, he said.
“We have gone to each and every hospital by ourselves and not found them”, said Wang Baoxia, whose elder brother is missing.
Firefighters were still working to extinguish blazes at the site on Saturday and China Central Television reported seven small explosions.
Among the dead were 21 firefighters, Xinhua said, calling it possibly the highest death toll among fire crews since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
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Earlier some monitoring stations detected toluene, chloroform, methylbenzene and volatile organic compounds, all hazardous pollutants, between Wednesday night and noon on Thursday, but their concentrations were decreasing and within normal range because of wind blowing toward the sea, said Feng Yinchang, an environmental expert.
