China blast death toll now 112
Men gather Saturday on an elevated highway near the smoking remains of an explosion in China’s Tianjin municipality. (Associated Press)
TIANJIN, China – New small explosions rocked a disaster zone Saturday in the Chinese port of Tianjin as teams scrambled to clear dangerous chemical contamination and found several more bodies to bring the death toll to 112 with 95 still missing from massive blasts earlier in the week.
Angry relatives of missing firefighters stormed a government news conference to demand any information on their loved ones, who have not been seen since a fire and rapid succession of blasts late Wednesday at a warehouse for hazardous chemicals in a mostly industrial area.
The death toll in the ensuing inferno included at least 21 firefighters – making the disaster the deadliest for Chinese firefighters in more than six decades.
Authorities at a news conference Sunday said 85 firefighters are still missing, and a total of 720 people were injured in the disaster in Tianjin, 75 miles east of Beijing. One additional survivor was found Saturday.
Two Chinese news outlets, including the state-run The Paper, 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 at levels slightly above safety levels at two locations in the afternoon, The Paper cited Tianjin environmental official Wen Wurui as saying. 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 whether firefighters may have triggered the blasts, possibly because they were unaware the warehouse contained chemicals combustible on contact with water. 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.
Authorities were keeping residents, journalists and other people not involved in the disaster response outside a 1.8-mile radius around the site of the explosions.
Meanwhile, family members of missing firefighters disrupted the latest news conference about the disaster, demanding to know whether their loved ones were still alive.
“(The authorities) didn’t notify us at all,” said Liu Huan, whose son Liu Chuntao has been missing since late Wednesday. “Our son is a firefighter, and there was a team of firefighters who lost contact. We couldn’t contact him.”