Death toll in China fire rises to 120

JILIN (Reuters) — The death toll from the fire at a poultry plant in northeast China’s Jilin province rose to 120 yesterday, with more than 70 injured.

Meanwhile, the relatives of the workers killed in the fire blocked traffic and scuffled with police yesterday, demanding answers to one of China’s worst industrial disasters in recent years.

A handful of men and woman knelt in the middle of the road in Jilin province to stop cars, while a crowd of more than 100 people gathered around them. Police dispersed the activists after about an hour.

Zhao Zhenchun, who lost both his wife and his sister in the fire, said human error was to blame for the death toll. “I don’t think safety was being managed properly. This should never happen again. They paid the price with their blood. So many of these big disasters in China are caused by lax supervision,” he said.

The world’s second-largest economy has a poor record on workplace safety. Fire exits in factories are often locked to prevent workers taking time off or stealing things, or blocked entirely.

“The rationale behind the locked doors boils down to efficiency. With the doors locked, workers cannot wander about freely, and therefore concentrate on their work,” the official Xinhua news agency said.

Safety regulations are also easily skirted by bribing corrupt officials, and in any case China has relatively few fire safety inspectors.

“Tragically, most of the inspections usually come after a disaster like this,” said Geoffrey Crothall, a China labor expert with Hong Kong-based advocacy group China Labor Bulletin. “There’s very little proactive or routine inspections of factories to make sure everybody’s up to code and that’s largely because there are too many factories and too few inspectors.”

It is a safety record likely to prompt concerns overseas as Chinese companies buy stakes in or take over foreign food producers, such as Shuanghui International Holdings’ $4.7 billion offer last week to buy leading US pork producer Smithfield Foods.

Loss of face

The disaster is also a major loss of face for a country which seeks to project a global image of a modern, rising power, different from developing countries like Bangladesh where such industrial disasters are frequent.

It is especially embarrassing as it comes just days ahead of an informal summit between President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama at which would very much like to be viewed as an equal to the world’s sole superpower.

Ironically, Monday’s fire in a building that was just four years old coincided with China announcing its latest manned space mission, a multi-billion dollar scheme designed to showcase the nation’s technological prowess and arrival on the world stage after decades of isolation and poverty.

“Many countries have the basic ability to avoid one-time disasters in which more than 100 people die ... China has reached this point,” the Global Times, a widely read and influential tabloid, said in an editorial about the fire.

“It is ... a blow to China’s modernization and the latest proof that Chinese society is unable to balance development and safety risks.”

In custody

The government has moved quickly to detain those believed responsible for the fire. While state media has not released details on them they will likely face long jail sentences, judging from how previous disasters have been handled.

A Xinhua report said ammonia gas leaks could have caused the explosions at the plant, which is owned by Jilin Baoyuanfeng Poultry Co, a small local feed and poultry producer. Jilin is a largely agricultural province and an important producer of corn and soybeans.

More than 300 workers were in the plant at Dehui on Monday, with employees saying they heard a bang and then saw smoke, Xinhua reported. Around 100 workers managed to escape from the plant, whose gate was locked when the fire broke out, it added. Nearby houses were evacuated.

Yesterday, Yang Xiuya sat cross-legged in front of a car and shouted angrily at police, insisting the doors of the slaughterhouse had been locked at the time of the fire. “My daughter worked there. They haven’t given us any explanation. It was time for my daughter to leave work, but the door was locked, so they all burned to death,” she shouted.

Another relative screamed at a line of dozens of unarmed SWAT police officers and tried to attack them before women pulled him back. “We can’t see our family members and there’s no information. We can’t see the survivors or the bodies of the dead. They need to let us see the bodies,” he shouted, wiping away angry tears.

Many of China’s deadly industrial accidents happen in the huge coal mining industry, in which more than 1,300 people died last year from explosions, mine collapses and floods. China’s worst fire disaster in recent times was in 1994 when 325 died in a theatre blaze in the far western region of Xinjiang in 1994.