Affected residents ramp up protests, amid reports China has found dangerous levels of nerve gas at site where firms reportedly broke safety regulations

Tianjin explosions: warehouse 'handled toxic chemicals without licence' – reports Read more

At least two other hazardous chemical facilities were operating in the Tianjin blast zone in violation of government regulations, environmental group Greenpeace has claimed, amid reports that Chinese authorities had detected dangerous levels of nerve gas at the site.

The catastrophic explosions – which have so far claimed at least 114 lives – happened last Wednesday night after a fire broke out at a portside warehouse operated by Ruihai International Logistics.

Large quantities of toxic chemicals including sodium cyanide were being stored in the warehouse, despite government regulations which state that such facilities must be located at least 1km from public places, transport networks and residential communities.

Li Xinghua, a fire official, told state broadcaster CCTV that clean-up teams had detected dangerously high levels of sodium cyanide and nerve gas at the scene of the explosions.

Now claims have emerged that at least two other companies, handling seven different types of flammable and toxic chemicals, were operating in the same area, in apparent violation of the same rules. The companies’ facilities are less than 1km from a nursery, a primary school, a motorway and a large residential area, Greenpeace claimed.

Image from Greenpeace shows the location of the Sinochem Tianjin Binhai Logistics Company Ltd. The red block shows the location of the hazardous chemicals warehouse. The yellow block indicates the location of a major residential area. The red line shows a radius of 1000m from the warehouse. Photograph: Greenpeace East Asia

Both companies are linked to the state-owned Sinochem Corporation, according to the group’s Beijing-based activists.

“We were shocked to find out that these three companies were able to store extremely dangerous chemicals so close to public areas including kindergartens, primary schools and middle schools,” Wu Yixiu, toxics campaigner for Greenpeace East Asia, told the Guardian.

“What is even more shocking is that this information was not known by people living close to the dangerous storage warehouse. This is a clear violation of the regulations.”

The revelation raises further questions about how companies were able to flout government rules and whether government officials were complicit in those violations.

Tianjin residents whose relatives are missing or whose homes were damaged have staged repeated protests demanding answers and compensation from the Communist party over the disaster. On Wednesday dozens of demonstrators took to the streets with a banner that read: “Refuse a cover-up! Refuse pollution! Need truth!”



Tianjin blasts: Communist party insists there will be no cover-up as anger grows Read more

“The blasts have left many unanswered questions,” Xinhua, China’s official news agency, reported. “How did the warehouse, which was so close to a residential area, secure a licence? Were residents made aware of the hazard? What caused the fire? Who is to blame?”

Speaking publicly for the first time since the disaster, the mayor of Tianjin, Huang Xingguo, said his city was facing an “unprecedented” crisis.

“The handling of this accident is very complicated – we have needed to put out the fire, to rescue people and to prevent [the spread of] dangerous chemicals,” he told a press conference, according to Beijing’s Guangming Daily newspaper.



“I feel very sad and remorseful about the huge number of casualties and the loss of property. As the chief of the Tianjian government, I have an unshirkable responsibility for this accident and I hereby offer my deep condolences to the victims.”



Nick Bisley, the executive director of La Trobe University Asia, said the Communist party was facing “a really, really challenging period” over the next few months.

Bisley said the Tianjin tragedy had “echoes” of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the way that it had shaken citizens’ already fragile trust in authorities.

“Chernobyl played such a big role in a loss of public faith in the system and perhaps more importantly a loss of confidence in the leadership. I just wonder if this has the potential to be something like that,” he said.

“The nuclear stuff always has a dimension that is much more horrifying for people than nasty chemical stuff and China today is not the Soviet Union in the 1980s economically,” Bisley admitted. But Beijing would be wrong to underestimate “the potential of this to mobilise discontent or to be a lightning rod for discontent”.

Thomas Kellogg, the director of the East Asia Program at New York’s Open Society Foundations, said that it was not yet clear how Ruihai International Logistics “was apparently able to violate the law” by storing hazardous chemicals so close to residential areas. “This is a question that needs to be fully investigated, and the results of that investigation needs to be fully disclosed,” he said.

Kellogg said the deadly incident underlined how little space China’s Communist rulers allowed campaigning groups to operate. “What this disaster tells us is that civil society in China is still very weak, and can’t yet push local governments to enforce the rules against companies, particularly those with strong Party connections.”

With president Xi Jinping currently waging a major offensive against civil society and NGOs, that situation would get worse not better, Kellogg predicted. “The ongoing crackdown sadly means that civil society will get weaker, even as the need for such groups grows stronger.”

Wu Yixiu, the Greenpeace campaigner, said the disaster highlighted “how important it is to have civil society and public supervision in place to monitor the implementation of safety regulations and the management of chemicals”.

Wu called on the government to take urgent steps to enforce safety regulations across China and to force companies to reveal to the public which chemicals were being stored and where. At the moment companies are under no obligation to make such details public.

Greenpeace named the two other companies storing hazardous chemicals in the blast zone as Sinochem Tianjin Binhai Logistics Company Ltd – whose storage facilities cover an area of 130,000 square metres – and Tianjin Port Sinochem Hazardous Goods Logistics Company Ltd.

The first company’s facilities are located less than one kilometre from a large residential area, a children’s nursery, two schools and other public areas, it said. The second company’s facilities are located less than 200m from a motorway.

Beijing has attempted to show it is responding to public anger by promising a top-level investigation to “define the nature and gravity of the accident, and determine liability.” Senior executives from Ruihai International Logistics have been detained and the Communist party’s mouthpiece newspaper has vowed there will be no cover up.

On Tuesday – as claims emerged that Ruihai International Logistics had been handling toxic chemicals without a licence – authorities announced that Yang Dongliang, the head of China’s state administration of work safety, was under investigation for corruption.



The decision to target Yang – who is Tianjin’s former deputy mayor - was widely seen as an attempt to calm public rage. However, activists and academics warned that symbolic punishments would do little to improve safety.

Additional reporting by Luna Lin