President demands all-out rescue efforts as blast at factory kills, hurts dozens
China’s top leadership on Friday ordered all-out efforts to search for and rescue victims of a deadly chemical blast in Jiangsu province in which 62 people died and 94 were seriously injured.
Strong measures also were taken to prevent any subsequent pollution. A thorough inspection of high-risk industries was ordered nationwide to root out similar dangers.
The blast occurred at 2:48 pm on Thursday at the Tianjiayi chemical plant in Xiangshui county’s Chenjiagang chemical park, and the fire spread to 16 enterprises nearby.
Hospitals treated about 640 people. Among them, 34 were in critical condition and 60 others had severe injuries, rescuers said on Friday.
President Xi Jinping, in Europe on a three-country tour, ordered on Friday all-out efforts to search for anyone who may be trapped by debris. The injured must be treated in a timely way, relief work must be done properly and social stability must be maintained.
Environmental monitoring and early warning systems also should be strengthened to prevent pollution as well as secondary disasters, said Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.
He urged authorities to find the cause of the explosion as soon as possible, and called for the timely release of information.
On Friday, the State Council, China’s Cabinet, set up an investigation team and named Deputy Minister of Emergency Management Huang Ming as its head.
Given that a series of major accidents have happened in different places recently, Xi asked local governments and authorities to learn hard lessons, intensify safety checks and strictly implement liability systems for safe production in order to prevent such incidents and protect people’s lives and property.
Premier Li Keqiang on Friday
demanded scientific and effective rescue and relief efforts to minimize casualties. Strong measures must be taken to prevent any possible subsequent disasters, he said. The Ministry of Emergency Management should push local authorities to conduct a thorough inspection of some high-risk sectors such as industries that handle dangerous and chemical substances, the premier added.
After the blast, some 930 firefighters joined the rescue, and as of 7 am on Friday, fires had been extinguished, officials said.
A total of 3,500 medical staff members, 16 hospitals and 90 ambulances responded. A nationallevel medical team of specialists in intensive care, burns, trauma, neurosurgery and psychology was rushed to the site, the National Health Commission said.
Nearby primary schools and kindergartens were suspended, and over 3,000 workers and almost 1,000 villagers were evacuated, the rescue headquarters said on Friday morning.
A resident of Wangshang village, about 500 meters from the blast, described moments he said he would never forget. The explosion destroyed windows and doors at his house, “and it even blew the back door through the front wall,” said the man, who gave his name as Chen.
His elder sister’s husband, who worked at the plant, died in the accident, and his nephew, also presumed to have been there, had not been heard from, Chen said as he packed on Friday to move to his uncle’s home in a neighboring city.
Checks showed that rivers around the industrial park had not been polluted, and local authorities were taking measures to stop polluted water inside the park from flowing out, according to Jiangsu’s department of ecology and environment.
Water samples collected at 8:40 am showed the water of three rivers inside the park was polluted by volatile organic compounds — chloroform, methylene chloride, dichloroethane and toluene. But no volatile organic compounds were detected in water of the three rivers outside the park, the department said. In the most seriously polluted river, the dichloroethane and methylene chloride concentration was about 2.8 times and 8.4 times higher than the standard, respectively, it said.
One of the waterways, the Guanhe River, flows into the Yellow Sea, and the plant is only a dozen kilometers from the river’s estuary. So it’s imperative to stop polluted waters inside the park from entering the Guanhe River, according to a release from a special work team dispatched by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.
The department said earlier that sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere were dispersing and the concentration was dropping. Other pollutants, including benzene, toluene and xylene, were at normal levels.
Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical Co, which runs the factory, was set up in 2007. A producer of chemical compounds, such as anisole, m-Phenylenediamine and para-Phenylenediamine, it has 195 workers, according to government files.
Zhang Qinyue, in charge of the company’s operation in Xiangshui, was injured in the blast, and factory staff members were under police control, according to a release from the Yancheng government.
Zhang was sentenced to 18 months with a two-year reprieve and fined 300,000 yuan ($44,690) for pollution by a court in the province in 2017, according to China Judgments Online. The company has been punished several times for safety loopholes and violating environmental rules, records show.
It was not the first time Chenjiagang Chemical Park had serious accidents. In late 2007, an explosion ripped through Jiangsu Lianhua Technology Co in the park, killing eight people and wounding dozens. In November 2010, chlorine leaked at another company in the park, Jiangsu Dahe Chlor-alkali Chemistry Co, and poisoned over 30 people nearby, according to media reports.
Li Chunhua, director-general of Green Stone Environmental Protection Center, an environmental NGO based in Nanjing, Jiangsu, said on Friday that they had started to look into the park in 2015 and found that not only Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical Co but also many other enterprises in the park had safety hazards and pollution issues including wastewater and exhaust gas emissions.
In 2018, the entire park was ordered to conduct a thorough overhaul and operations of all chemical companies were suspended over safety and pollution problems, Li said. After eight months, the problems were considered to be corrected and the factories were allowed to reopen.