China Tianjin blasts: Missing firefighters’ families demand answers

Renault said that almost 1500 of its imported cars stored in a warehouse at the port had been burned while Toyota said the blasts broke windows at its vehicle assembly, logistics, and research buildings, which are jointly run with China’s FAW Group.

Chinese language rescue staff have been nonetheless digging by way of rubble Thurs.in a desperate hunt for survivors following a collection of explosions the day before at a hazardous chemical compounds warehouse within the port city of Tianjin in that killed no less than 50 & injured greater than 700.

The city is a 30-minute train ride from Beijing, and home to 14.72 million people, according to 2013 data from China National Bureau of Statistics.

The victims of Wednesday’s disaster included at least 21 firefighters, authorities said.

The blast was so big fireballs and explosions could be seen from space and such was the magnitude of the explosion it registered as seismic activity.

Officials said specialists from sodium cyanide producers were being sent to the site.

People who were relocated at the second primary school of Tianjin Development Zone were transferred on Saturday morning, after receiving an alert of wind change.

“Many types of different materials with different characteristics are mixed together and could at any time result in a chemical reaction or explosion”, he said.

So far, environmental officials said that they’ve found nothing unusual in the waters off Tianjin, state media reported. “In my mind, the presence of ammonium nitrate makes it easier to explain the level of devastation”, he said.

Zhou said more than 1,000 firefighters, including 232 from neighboring Hebei Province, were still at the site.

“We knew there was calcium carbide inside but we didn’t know whether it had already exploded”, Lei said.

Xinhua identified the owner of the warehouse as Tianjin Dongjiang Port Ruihai global Logistics and the China Daily newspaper said its manager had been detained.

It was not clear what caused the blast, but Xinhua described the facility as a storage and distribution centre of containers of unsafe goods, including chemicals.

Phone numbers listed on the site were disconnected. This is not the first time a blast of this magnitude happens in China, a year ago, 75 people lost their lives when a room filled with metal dust went off.

The warehouse site was destroyed by the explosions, he told reporters at a news conference, and managers of the facility have provided “insufficient information” about what was stored there.

Smoke continued to billow out from the massive pile of hundreds of twisted and damaged containers as well as areas where large quantity of deadly toxic chemicals were piled up for exports before they were caught up in the explosions.