TIANJIN, China — Authorities pulled more bodies from a massive blast site in the Chinese port of Tianjin, pushing the death toll to 112 on Sunday as teams scrambled to clear dangerous chemical contamination. Hundreds of people were injured and 85 firefighters and 10 others are missing since a fire and rapid succession of blasts late Wednesday hit a warehouse for hazardous chemicals in a mostly industrial area of Tianjin, 120 kilometers (75 miles) east of Beijing.
New small explosions continued to rock the locked-down disaster zone over the weekend.
Angry relatives of the missing firefighters stormed a government news conference Saturday to demand any information on their loved ones. The death toll includes at least 21 firefighters — making the disaster the deadliest for Chinese firefighters in more than six decades.
Two state-run Chinese news outlets, The Paper and the Southern Metropolis, reported that 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 temporarily detected the highly toxic hydrogen cyanide in the air slightly above safety levels at two locations, Tianjin environmental official Bao Jingling told a news conference Sunday morning. The contamination Saturday afternoon, at 4 percent and 50 percent above the safety level, was no longer detectable later Saturday, Bao said. “These levels are actually very low,” he said.
The disaster has raised questions about whether dangerous chemicals were being stored too close to residential compounds, whether firefighters were put into harm's way in the initial response to the fire and whether the hazardous material — including compounds combustible on contact with water — was properly taken into account in the way the firefighters responded.
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.
Rescuers pulled out a survivor from a shipping container on Saturday, state media reported. Footage showed the 56-year-old man being carried out on a sketcher by a group of soldiers wearing gas masks. He remained in critical condition on Sunday, local media reported. — AP
