BEIJING — The high-rise apartment complex closest to Tianjin’s toxic chemical storage inferno was only 2,000 feet away, despite Chinese laws requiring a 3,200-foot minimum distance from hazardous sites.
BEIJING — The high-rise apartment complex closest to Tianjin’s toxic chemical storage inferno was only 2,000 feet away, despite Chinese laws requiring a 3,200-foot minimum distance from hazardous sites.
The disclosure was among the new details emerging Friday that suggested possible criminal negligence, mixed with rife speculation of an official cover-up, in the aftermath of the fire Wednesday night in Tianjin — China’s third-largest city and a major northeast seaport, about 90 miles east of Beijing.
With the death toll rising to at least 85 on Friday, more than 700 hospitalized and an unknown number still missing in the smoldering wreckage, the fire was shaping up as one of China’s worst industrial calamities. It appeared to expose the kinds of regulatory lapses that have plagued the country’s transformation into a global economic powerhouse.
Government officials, acutely aware of concerns over the fire, have sought to suppress unauthorized information. They seemed unprepared for the tough questions posed at a news conference in Tianjin on Friday, including why hazardous chemicals had been stockpiled so near populated areas. They abruptly ended the conference.
With uncharacteristic defiance, some Chinese news outlets did their own reporting anyway.
Local residents have said they had no idea that any risk had been posed by the warehouses where the fire began, a modest blaze that suddenly exploded in mammoth fireballs. They engulfed office buildings and port facilities, as well as onlookers who had gathered to watch the firefighters at work.
The developers of Vanke Port City, a residential complex that is practically at the incinerated area’s doorstep and has now been evacuated indefinitely, said they had been told when they started construction in 2010 that the warehouses in question handled only “common goods.”
“We were never notified that the warehouses were modified to handle dangerous goods,” a spokesman for the developer said in an email.
According to Chinese law, facilities that handle hazardous materials must be more than 3,200 feet from homes and public buildings. Vanke is 2,000 feet away.
Suspicions among the populace were further raised by the censorship of information. The vacuum was filled by online speculation about whether the owners of Rui Hai International Logistics, the company that owned the warehouse where the blasts originated, might be connected to senior government leaders.
The government’s online corporate registry for Tianjin remained offline nearly two days after the disaster, fueling concerns about a possible cover-up. Officials have said that the blasts disabled the website, which lists details about corporate ownership.
Questions have also been raised about whether the hundreds of firefighters who raced to the scene had been aware of the potential hazards, and whether they had been trained to combat complex and volatile chemical fires. At least 24 of the dead were firefighters.
According to news reports, about 700 tons of sodium cyanide, a compound that releases highly toxic gas, had been stored at the Rui Hai warehouse. The site was also licensed to handle calcium carbide, a dangerous compound known to release flammable gases when mixed with water.
One fire official told The Paper, an online Chinese publication, that water might have been used to douse the initial fire. Southern Weekly, a newspaper known for occasional muckraking reporting, quoted a firefighter who said he had received no instructions about the risks of spraying water on the fire.