Chinese port rattled by new explosions

More bodies bring death toll to 112

Tianjin, China — Authorities pulled more bodies from a massive blast site in the Chinese port of Tianjin, pushing the death toll to 112 on Sunday as teams scrambled to clear dangerous chemical contamination.

Hundreds of people were injured and 85 firefighters and10 others are missing since a fire and rapid succession of blasts late Wednesday hit a warehouse for hazardous chemicals in a mostly industrial area of Tianjin, 75 miles east of Beijing. New small explosions continued to rock the lockeddown disaster zone over the weekend.

Angry relatives of the missing firefighters stormed a government news conference Saturday to demand information on their loved ones. The death toll includes at least 21 firefighters — making the disaster the deadliest for Chinese firefighters in more than six decades.

Two state-run Chinese news outlets, The Paper and the Southern Metropolis, reported the warehouse was storing 700 tons of sodium cyanide — 70 times more than it should have been holding at one time, and that authorities were rushing to clean it up.

Sodium cyanide is a toxic chemical that can form a flammable gas upon contact with water.

Authorities also detected the highly toxic hydrogen cyanide in the air slightly above safety levels at two locations, an environmental official said. But the contamination was no longer detected later Saturday, the report said.

The disaster has raised questions about whether dangerous chemicals were being stored too close to residential compounds, and if poor decisions unnecessarily sent firefighters into the harm’s way. The massive explosions Wednesday happened about 40 minutes after reports of a fire at the warehouse and after an initial wave of firefighters arrived and, reportedly, doused some of the area with water.

Rescuers pulled out a survivor from a shipping container on Saturday, state media reported.