A year ago a massive blast in a warehouse shook northern Chinese port, Tianjin which took away 170 lives. A year after on the eve of the first anniversary of hazardous Tianjin explosion, again another blast in a South China power plant killed at least 21 and injured five.
According to the Xinhua news agency, the explosion occurred when a high pressure steam pipe at the Madian Ganshi Power Generation Co. exploded around 3:20 pm in Dangyang city in central Hubei province. The head of the administration Yang Huanning said that the State Administration of Work Safety has sent off a team for rescue and to investigate the situation.
The injured people were taken to the hospitals and rescue work is still underway. State media published photos where fire hoses spraying a tower engulfed in flames.
A resident of the Qihang Gardens residential complex said due to the blast almost 17,000 households were affected, he and his family waiting to get back into their apartment. But some residents are unwilling to return as they fearing of the chemical contamination from the blast.
He further said that the government is ordering them to move back into their apartment but until now not a single family has moved back into the Qihang Gardens or Haigangcheng neighborhood.
Locals first believed that they have been hit by a bomb. The first of the two explosions measured 2.3 on the Richter scale and the second explosion was 28 times more powerful equivalent to 450 metric tons of TNT.
The government confirmed that 40 different toxic chemicals were in the surrounding area including 700 metric tons of sodium cyanide. The pollution fear was growing among the resident.
After the blast it was found that the company Ruihai International Logistics was dealing with dangerous chemicals without a license for eight months and failed to train its staffs appropriately to handle dangerous chemicals. As a result, ten executives of the company were arrested.
The fatal blasts at industrial plants in China are common. This raised questions about the safety standards of industrial plants.
After the deadly blast in Tianjin last August, the authorities guaranteed to raise Chinaās industrial standards. But one year later this accident only showed that their promise was just only for that moment, they didnāt take their own words seriously to improve the industrial standards.
