Death toll rises in Tianjin blasts

About 700 people were injured, 71 seriously.

Fires are still sending plumes of smoke over the destroyed buildings, burned-out vehicles and crumpled shipping containers that bore the brunt of the explosions.

Earlier on Friday, about 32 hours after the explosions, rescuers pulled a trapped firefighter out of rubble. State television later said it was a firefighter.

The warehouse, designed to house risky and toxic chemicals, was storing mainly ammonium nitrate, potassium nitrate and calcium carbide at the time of the blasts, according to the police.

Firefighters have been using foam to try to extinguish the remaining fires at the blast site, officials said.

And if we get calcium carbide – especially if it’s hot – mixed with water, we form a very, very flammable and highly explosive gas called acetylene.

Tianjin Fire Department head Zhou Tian said at a news conference Friday that the explosions occurred just as reinforcements had arrived on the scene and were just getting to work.

In an interview with the Shanghai-based publication The Paper, a fire official at the Ministry of Public Safety, Lei Jinde, was quoted as confirming that the first wave of firefighters used water to cool down areas on fire. A fire is what caused the explosions, but the cause of the fire has not yet been determined.

Meanwhile, angry relatives of firefighters missing in the catastrophe stormed a government news conference to demand information on their loved ones.

Zhang said she could see wounded people weeping.

Other problems exposed by the blasts include inadequate safety management of risky materials at ports, irregular practices among workers, weak emergency responses to incidents and lax supervision by authorities, said the notice.

But moments later, he witnesses the first of two massive blasts he would later describe as being like “a small nuclear bomb”.

Shattered glass could be seen upto three kilometres from the site of the blast. “Calcium carbide reacts with the water and that’s a reasonably violent reaction in and of itself, because it releases gas”. The blasts were spotted from space by satellites, and were picked up by seismometers which registered them as a magnitude 2 to 3 natural disaster.

More than 200 chemical and biological experts from the military are on site but officials insist that the air and water quality levels in Tianjin are safe. Authorities have moved them to nearby schools after their apartment buildings and homes were damaged. A fireball appears to have swept through a parking lot of 1,000 new Renault cars, with the paint burned off and the cars left charred.

The reports were not yet verified, Gao said. Oil tanker arrivals and departures were also disrupted.

On Sunday, Chinese state media said the number of dead had risen to 112.

Port operator the Tianjin Port Group said Thursday that “dozens” of its employees were missing.

The company said on its website it was a government-approved firm specialising in handling “dangerous goods”.