Huge blasts leave scores dead in China
Our Correspondent
Enormous explosions in a major Chinese port city killed at least 44 people and injured more than 500, officials said yesterday, leaving a devastated industrial landscape of incinerated cars, toppled shipping containers and burnt-out buildings, reports AFP, Tianjin, China.
An AFP reporter in Tianjin saw shattered glass up to three kilometres (two miles) from the site of the blast, a storage facility for dangerous goods where the detonation unleashed a fireball that lit up the night sky and rained debris on the city.
The explosion was felt several kilometres away, even being picked up by a Japanese weather satellite, and images showed walls of flame enveloping buildings and rank after rank of gutted cars at an import facility.
When I felt the explosion I thought it was an earthquake, resident Zhang Zhaobo told AFP. I ran to my father and I saw the sky was already red. All the glass was broken, and I was really afraid.
Other residents, some partially clothed, ran for shelter on a street strewn with debris.
The fireball was huge, maybe as much as 100 metres tall, said 27-year-old Huang Shiting, who lives close to the site.
I heard the first explosion and everyone went outside, then there was a series of more explosions, windows shattered and a lot of people who were inside were hurt and came running out, bleeding, he told AFP.
Paramedics stretchered the injured into the citys hospitals as doctors bandaged up victims, many of them covered in blood. The local Binhai district authorities said on a verified social media account that 44 people were killed, including 12 firefighters.
Scores of firefighters were already on the scene before the explosion, responding to a fire, and at one city hospital a doctor wept over a dead firefighter still in uniform, his skin blackened from smoke, as he was wheeled past along with two other bodies.
Binhai officials said 521 people had been hospitalised, 52 of them in critical condition, and the official Xinhua news agency reported at least 21 more were missing.
Mei Xiaoya, 10, and her mother were turned away from the first hospital they went to because there were too many people, she told AFP.
Im not afraid, its just a scratch, she said pointing to the bandage on her arm. But mum was hurt badly, she couldnt open her eyes. Plumes of smoke still billowed over buildings hours after the blast, which occurred shortly before midnight local time.
Of course I was afraid, how can you not be afraid? said a man as he looked at his apartment block behind a police cordon. I ran. I grabbed my child and my wife and ran.
The blaze was brought under initial control on Thursday afternoon, Xinhua cited the public security ministry as saying, after 1,000 firefighters and 143 fire engines had been deployed to the site. But officials were unable to say what triggered the initial fire or the subsequent explosions.
The force of the first explosion was the equivalent of three tonnes of TNT, the China Earthquake Networks Centre said on its verified Weibo account, with the second equal to 21 tonnes.
Xinhua described the facility as a storage and distribution centre of containers of dangerous goods, including chemicals.Executives from its owner, Tianjin Dongjiang Port Rui Hai International Logistics, were taken into custody by police, it said.
