Ascending 64 dead by an explosion in China, with 28 missing
The death toll as a result of an explosion in a chemical industrial estate in eastern China is now 64, with 21 critically injured and 28 people still missing, the state news agency Xinhua reported today.
The authorities of Yancheng, place of the event, assured that the rescue teams continue working day and night to try to find the missing and managed to rescue a person this Saturday morning.
The explosion also left 640 injured, 94 of them seriously, including the 21 that remain in critical condition.
According to Xinhua, "thousands of firefighters and health workers, as well as hundreds of ambulances and fire trucks" participate in the rescue operation.
The event that occurred around 14.48 local time (06.48 GMT) this Thursday after declaring a fire in a pesticide plant owned by the company Jiangsu Tianjiayi Chemical, whose managers are in police custody.
Witnesses quoted by the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post said the explosion caused "a shower of crystals" from the windows that the blast shattered even several kilometers away, and one of them related how he saw a three-year-old child fly away by the force of the explosion.
The Hogkonian newspaper said that the company that owns the accident site had received six administrative sanctions for violating waste management legislation, environmental impact and air pollution.
The schools and nurseries in the area were closed, and about 3,000 people were evacuated, while the authorities are monitoring the quality of air and water.
Dozens of workers were trapped after some buildings collapsed due to the blast.
The images disclosed by the local media showed at first a large column of smoke as a result of the explosion while another video posted shows how the factory, or an adjacent building, jumps through the air and dozens of people who were in the vicinity they escape bloody.
Accidents are frequent in the Chinese industrial sector, where, despite new initiatives, regulations remain lax.
On November 28, at least 22 people died and another 22 were injured in an explosion near a chemical plant in the city of Zhangjiakou, a hundred kilometers northwest of Beijing.
In 2015, the northern city of Tianjin was the protagonist of one of the most tragic incidents in recent years, which killed at least 170 people after an explosion in a container terminal in the port of the city.
