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Social media images reveal billowing smoke emerging from the factory. Photo: Screenshot via Sina Weibo
A disastrous explosion that struck a metal polishing factory Saturday morning in the southeastern province of Jiangsu has killed at least 68 people and left 187 injured, Chinese state media reported.
Photographers capture images of smoke emerging from the blast. Photo: Xinhua
The blast occurred at 7:37am in a workshop owned by the Zhongrong Metal Products company in Kunshan, an industrial city some 50 kilometres west of Shanghai.
Kunshan authorities said they suspected the blast was due to a dust explosion. The incident occurred in an alloy polishing plant for automobile wheels, where an excessive amount of inflammable metallic dust had possibly accumulated and met live sparks.
Images on China Central Television (CCTV) showed large plumes of black smoke billowing from the low-rise factory building with other images showing the injured lying on wooden pallets and being loaded onto trucks and ambulances.
“The scene is a mess, it’s unrecognisable,” a witness at the scene wrote on Sina Weibo.
The explosion occurred around 7:30 Saturday morning. Photo: Screenshot via Sina Weibo
Local Kunshan hospital staff confirmed at around 9:40am this morning that over 150 victims have been admitted for both burn wounds and respiratory infections sustained from breathing smoke.
The owner of a restaurant about two blocks from the scene said many people in the neighborhood, including himself, were not aware of the accident until late in the morning. He said he was shocked by the high death toll announced by the authorities.
"Many people living nearby were not sure that they had heard it happening," he said. "I find it hard to believe that so many lives were lost. This is an old industrial town. We have not seen anything so deadly."
Medical staff attend to the injured. Photo: Screenshot via Sina Weibo
Others, like Zhou Xu, a 26-year-old working at a plant across from the factory, were more affected by the explosion.
"We heard a really loud blast at about 7am this morning so we rushed out of our dormitories," said Zhou Xu, a 26-year-old working at a plant across the site. "First the ambulances came, then as the news surfaced in the media, many families - especially the wives - rushed to the site to see if their husbands were okay."
A security guard from an adjacent factory who declined to be named said the impact from the blast was so great that it shattered the windows of his guard house, located about 500 metres away from the site of the disaster.
The roof of the damaged workshop in the aftermath of the explosion. Photo: AP
“I learned the news from my mobile phone. I went to the factory to see if I could help but the police and government rescuers were already there keeping people off the lines," said a pharmacy worker who lived near the factory and declined to be named.
"The factory seemed to be a mess inside, with lots of smoke, but almost everything outside remained intact... The death toll was high probably because the destructive force was limited in a narrow space and there was no way to escape.”
Struggling to cope with a large influx of victims, local hospitals in Kunshan and Suzhou have requested help from major hospitals in neighbouring Shanghai, and are calling on residents to donate blood at temporary collection points set up across the cities, Chinese media reported.
Medical personnel transport a victim at a hospital after the explosion. Photo: Reuters
By early afternoon, the police had cordoned off access to the factory. Authorities had also cleaned up the factory’s exterior, and a crowd of bystanders and rows of fire-trucks parked in the compound were the only outward signs of the calamity that had occurred hours earlier.
Zhongrong Metal Products representatives have yet to comment on the incident. The firm employs 450 workers and counts General Motors and other US companies as clients.
Police have detained five company executives, and the cause of the incident is still under investigation, CCTV reported.
Smoke rises from the factory as workers gather outside in charred, tattered clothes following the explosion yesterday. Photo: Imagine China
The identities of more victims in the deadly Kunshan factory explosion have been confirmed by DNA tests, including that of two men and 21 women who were killed.
The Kunshan government released the sheet on Tuesday morning – four days after the blast – which also listed the names of 73 people who were injured.
The 23 fatalities came from the provinces of Anhui, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Henan, Gansu, Shandong and Hebei, according to the paper, which listed the workers' names, gender and home province.
Full list of deceased and injured (In Putonghua)
The blast had ripped through the car parts factory owned by Taiwanese-backed Kunshan Zhongrong Metal Products on Sunday morning as more than 260 workers were inside. At least 75 people were killed and 186 were injured.
Dust had ignited spark plugs in a workshop, causing the explosion, according to a preliminary investigation, Yang Dongliang, chief of the State Administration of Work Safety, told Xinhua.
The sparks were traced back to a workshop used to polish car wheel hubs.
The government was only able to release the first list of victims on Monday evening, with the names of 16 dead and 14 wounded, as police needed to conduct DNA tests to confirm the people’s identities.
However, distraught relatives and friends struggled to come to grips with the reality of their loved ones’ death, written on paper.
"How can the name Ge Guoping be listed even if his relatives didn’t take DNA tests?” one family member was quoted by Dahe Daily as saying after the first list was released.
Most of the staff in the polishing workshop were aged between 35 and 45 and were their families’ breadwinners, previous reports said.
The explosion has renewed concerns over the dangerous work conditions in mainland factories.
Preliminary investigations showed that the 2,000 square metre workshop was designed for 29 production lines and about 300 workers, but was not equipped with sufficient dust-removal equipment.
Local authorities were also blamed for “inadequate supervision”. The Kunshan Economic and Technological Development Zone, where the Zhongrong plant was located, only has four employees to oversee production safety, according to the Modern Express newspaper.
In the wake of the tragedy, the State Council’s work safety committee has demanded that all factories must inspect for the presence of magnesium or aluminium dust to “curb any possibilities of similar accidents”, news website Xinhuanet.com reports.
Provincial authorities in Jiangsu have also vowed to take a “zero tolerance” approach to safety lapses when it undertakes a safety inspection in industrial zones, construction sites, schools, hospitals, entertainment venues, airports, bus stations and scenic spots.
