TIANJIN, China – New small explosions rocked a disaster zone in the Chinese port of Tianjin on Saturday as teams scrambled to clear dangerous chemical contamination and found several more bodies to bring the death toll to 104 in massive blasts earlier in the week.
Angry relatives of missing firefighters stormed a government news conference to demand any information on their loved ones, who have not been seen since a fire and rapid succession of blasts late Wednesday at a warehouse for hazardous chemicals in a mostly industrial area.
The death toll in the ensuing inferno included at least 21 firefighters – making the disaster the deadliest for Chinese firefighters in more than six decades.
An unknown number of firefighters remain missing, and a total of 720 people were injured in the disaster in Tianjin, 75 miles east of Beijing. One additional survivor was found Saturday.
Two Chinese news outlets, including the state-run The Paper, reported that the warehouse was storing 700 tons of sodium cyanide – 70 times more than it should have been holding at one time – and that authorities were rushing to clean it up.
Sodium cyanide is a toxic chemical that can form a flammable gas upon contact with water.
Authorities also detected highly toxic hydrogen cyanide in the air at levels slightly above safety levels at two locations in the afternoon, The Paper cited Tianjin environmental official Wen Wurui as saying. But the contamination was no longer detected later Saturday, and there was no obvious impact on anybody in the area, the report said.
Associated Press videojournalists Paul Traynor and Peng Peng in Tianjin and writers Didi Tang and Ian Mader in Beijing and Frances D’Emilio in Rome contributed to this report.
