China blasts: Tianjin port city rocked by explosions

At least 50 people are believed to have lost their lives and 700 hospitalised, after two massive explosions caused by flammable goods ripped through an industrial area in the northeast Chinese port city of Tianjin late on Wednesday, according to the city’s municipal government. According to the official Xinhua News Agency, among the victims are 12 firefighters. Over 1,000 firefighters were sent to put out the blaze set off by the explosions at around 11.30 pm, while more than 200 armed police officers and specialist anti-chemical warfare troops were also sent to the site.

It was not clear what caused the blast, but Xinhua described the facility as a storage and distribution centre of containers of dangerous goods, including chemicals. 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, followed by a second blast equal to 21 tonnes.

The second blast came roughly 30 seconds after the first, which had triggered a shockwave that was felt kilometres away, state media said. Meanwhile, President Xi Jinping demanded that authorities quickly extinguish the fire caused by the blasts and “make full effort to rescue and treat the injured and ensure the safety of people and their property”, China Central Television (CCTV) said on its official microblog.

An AFP reporter in Tianjin saw shattered glass up to three kilometres from the site of the blast, where the detonation unleashed a fireball that lit up the night sky and rained debris on the city.

The explosion that left a devastated industrial landscape of incinerated cars, toppled shipping containers and burnt-out buildings, was 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.

Video posted on YouTube from what appeared to be an apartment building some distance from the scene showed fire shooting into the night sky from the initial blast when the second, much bigger, explosion rocked the area, sending a huge fireball into the air.

Executives from its owner, Tianjin Dongjiang Port Rui Hai International Logistics, were taken into custody by police, it said. Meanwhile, the website of the logistics company became inaccessible on Thursday.

Citing a local hospital, Xinhua said people had been hurt by broken glass and stones and some were seriously wounded.

CCTV said on its website about 100 fire trucks had been sent to the scene.

China has a dismal industrial safety record as some factory and warehouse owners evade regulations to save money and pay off corrupt officials to look the other way.

In 2013, a pipeline explosion at state-owned oil refiner Sinopec’s facility in the eastern port of Qingdao killed 62 people and injured 136.

In July this year, 15 people were killed and more than a dozen injured when an illegal fireworks warehouse exploded in the northern province of Hebei, which neighbours Tianjin.

And at least 71 were killed in an explosion at a car parts factory in Kunshan, near Shanghai, in August last year.