Minister stresses need to prevent secondary accidents while Greenpeace says chemicals blamed for Tianjin blasts continue to pose threat

Elite military units trained to deal with chemical, nuclear and biological disasters have been dispatched to the site of a deadly explosion in northern China, where fires still smouldered in a landscape of destruction more than a day after the original devastating blasts.

At least 50 deaths have been confirmed and 701 people admitted to hospital with injuries – 71 of those said to be “severe” – after a fire at warehouse containing “dangerous chemicals” sparked a series of blasts on Wednesday night.

Beijing vowed to deploy “every resource available” to help survivors, as environment groups warned that some of the substances handled near the site of the blast were both toxic and explosive, and said the government needed to keep people informed about risks of pollution.

Four vehicles carrying more than 200 soldiers trained to deal with nuclear, biological and chemical catastrophes were dispatched to Tianjin, which is around 100 miles from Beijing.

Tianjin explosions so huge they were visible from space Read more

The explosions were so powerful that they tossed vehicles into the air, blasted buildings into blackened shells and torched hundreds of new cars lined up nearby for shipment.

Windows in buildings several hundred metres away were shattered and thousands of people fled their shaking high-rise apartments fearing that an earthquake had hit. So strong was the blast that it twisted doors out of their frames.

“We were rushing down the emergency stairs in the darkness, and heard some people banging … They were locked inside and their doors were damaged so they couldn’t get out,” a woman who lived on the 20th floor of a nearby high-rise, and gave her name as Mrs Huo, told the Guardian.

By Thursday afternoon at least 1,000 firefighters and more than 140 fire engines were attempting to bring the flames under control around the main disaster zone, a portside industrial estate in Tianjin, but had given up trying to extinguish them.

“The volatility of the goods means the fire is especially unpredictable and dangerous to approach,” the official Xinhua agency said.

Still, as the worst of the blaze subsided, some survivors put on face masks as scant protection against clouds of noxious smoke still billowing from the wreckage, and headed back towards battered homes to see if they could salvage anything.

Thousands of people will not be able to return to their homes, and the army has helped set up tents to house them on nearby school playgrounds, after many spent an anxious a night on the street.

Around 10,000 medical staff were working at 10 different hospitals to treat survivors, Zhang Yong, a local Communist party official said. Dozens of volunteers also flocked to hospitals and the housing camps, bringing food, water and other help. Some held up signs offering free rides to survivors.

“Most of the people here will have to get to work in the morning, but we will be back again afterwards,” said Ma Zhankui, coordinating dozens of helpers outside Tianjin Tenda hospital. “We’re getting supplies coming in constantly but it’s a bit of a mess.”

There was also frustration in the city at efforts to control information about the disaster, with a local television station coming in for particular derision for showing Korean soap operas the morning after the disaster, without mentioning the destruction on their doorstep.

China’s stability-obsessed leaders often attempt to stifle potentially critical media coverage during disasters, and social media users complained that their posts about the disaster were being deleted.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paramilitary police near the scene of the explosions in Tianjin. Photograph: Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

In an editorial, the Global Times, a Beijing-controlled tabloid, urged authorities to be transparent about the situation. “The Tianjin government must take critical feedback and ensure it can release accurate and timely information. The idea that they wanted to tone down the reporting and even cover it up must be eliminated,” it said.

During a visit to the scene, Guo Shengkun, China’s public security minister, said every possible measure would be taken to prevent further loss of life or injury. “Deep lessons must be learned,” Guo said, stressing the “absolute necessity” to stop secondary accidents.

Greenpeace said the situation in Tianjin, which is home to around 14 million people, remained volatile and potentially dangerous. “We are concerned that certain chemicals will continue to pose a risk to the residents of Tianjin,” it said.

“According to the Tianjin Tanggu environmental monitoring station, hazardous chemicals stored by the company concerned include sodium cyanide, toluene diisocyanate and calcium carbide , all of which pose direct threats to human health on contact.”

Sodium cyanide is highly toxic, as it releases hydrogen cyanide gas, which interferes with the ability to breathe and can be “rapidly fatal”, the US centre for disease control said. It has a distinctive smell that has been described as bitter almonds or “musty old sneakers” but many people cannot detect it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Drone footage shows devastation caused by the explosion in Tianjin.

The other two named chemicals react violently with water, with risk of explosion, which makes rain or firefighting with water extremely risky.

Cheng Qian, Greenpeace’s toxics assistant campaign manager in Beijing, said: “It is now critical that relevant authorities monitor the situation closely and release further information on what caused the blast and what chemicals are being released into the air. This will have an impact on measures to fight fires, to protect the residents of Tianjin, and on minimising the potential health and environmental hazards of the blast.”

The government has admitted there was some contamination from the blast, but said prevailing winds were pushing it out to sea rather than inland towards Tianjin city centre and other urban areas nearby. Beijing is just a few dozen kilometres away from the disaster site.

China has a woeful record of safety standards. In the four months before the Tianjin explosion there were six major blasts at chemical plants across China, Greenpeace reported.

This week, a landslide in north-west Shaanxi province left 65 people missing and buried dormitories of the Shaanxi Wuzhou Mining Company, and at least one person was reported dead after a subway construction site disappeared into a sinkhole.

“Chinese people are used to this kind of disaster,” said 26-year-old Zhen Youguo, who works in shipping and had come to take pictures near the site of the blast in Tianjin.

The company at the heart of Wednesday’s disaster was found to have violated safety standards during an inspection of packaging two years ago, Reuters reported.

Spot checks at a port warehouse belonging to Ruihai International Logistics found that 4,325 containers were checked and five failed because packaging was sub-standard, the Tianjin maritime safety administration said.



The inspections were part of a wider investigation of five companies, which found 29 containers had failed packaging checks, a report posted on the safety watchdog’s website found. The main problem was inadequate “danger” labelling, the report said, but did not provide further details.

The manager of the private firm, which described itself as a government-approved company, has been arrested, the China Daily reported, but an online national database of company registration appeared to have been disabled on Thursday afternoon, making it impossible to identify who owned the firm.

A notice posted on the official website of the Tianjin market and quality supervision administration said: “Due to the blast accident, the Tianjin company credibility information system has been temporarily disabled.”

The company has a 46,000 square-metre facility in Tianjin port, and the explosion was pinpointed as coming from a warehouse there. It handled a million tonnes of cargo a year, and earned at least 30m yuan, according to a website that has been taken down.

The blast also partly shut down Tianjin port, the 10th largest in the world, which handles large quantities of crude oil, metal ore, coal and steel, and more containers than Rotterdam, Hamburg and Los Angeles, the Associated Press reported.

The maritime safety administration said ships carrying oil and “hazardous products” were barred from entering the port, and all vessels were banned from the central zone near the blast site.

Additional reporting by Luna Lin