China investigates top work safety regulator after warehouse blast

At least 21 firefighters are among the dead, state media reported.

RESIDENTS near China’s port city of Tianjin are bracing for poisoning downpours with fears forecast rain will set off more chemical reactions at the site of last week’s deadly explosions.

Officials have insisted the city’s air and water are safe, but locals and victims’ relatives have voiced scepticism.

With rain expected in Tianjin tomorrow, soldiers and rescue workers in gas masks and protective gear are rushing to clear more than 700 tonnes of deadly sodium cyanide stored at two separate sites. “Hydrogen cyanide interferes with the body’s ability to use oxygen particularly affecting the brain, heart and lungs and can rapidly lead to death”, she said.

Authorities had built sand and earth barriers around the blasts’ 100,000-square-metre “core area” to prevent any pollutant leakage, said He.

Tianjin’s environment protection bureau has also expressed worries that these containers may have been contaminated because some of them containing risky chemicals have burst open.

Seventy people are still missing, including 64 firefighters and five policemen, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The company did not cease working with unsafe chemicals after the license expired.

As the work continues to identify those who were killed in the blast, the death toll stood at 114 people on Tuesday, with 70 still missing, majority firefighters.

Smoke was still rising from the site on Monday afternoon.

Many are angry that the government allowed a warehouse storing hazardous chemicals to operate near residential neighborhoods where thousands lived.

State news agency Xinhua said Tuesday that the user of the warehouse that exploded, Ruihai global Logistics Co., operated for months without the needed documentation to deal with such chemicals. “No one has noticed us yet”.

“Depending upon the amount of sodium cyanide that is there, I would be concerned about the residues of sodium cyanide that may have been distributed across the area, and how that cleanup will be managed”, he says.

The government has sought to limit criticism of the handling of the disaster.

But even as the community rallies together, questions remain about what caused the blasts.

There was also light rainfall over the blast site on Wednesday.

Reuters spoke to several captains of tankers and dry bulk freighters that are currently in the Tianjin port region, either waiting to discharge or to leave the port, and all said that operations now seemed to be broadly back to normal.

Yang was being investigated for “severe violation of discipline and law”, the Chinese Communist Party corruption watchdog said, but didn’t directly link the probe to the disaster.

The comments may indicate that individuals could be held responsible for the disaster, and that central authorities are looking to portray it as an aberration rather than a systemic failure. Of them, eight exceeded safety levels. “If not, we will continue to see these kinds of risky accidents”.

“Loopholes must be closed, and regulations must be implemented strictly and effectively”.