Crews searched for an unknown number of civilians and soldiers Saturday who are believed trapped by multiple explosions that killed at least 104 people this week in this eastern Chinese city.
As of Saturday evening, more than 40 people have been rescued in Tianjin, including a 19-year-old firefighter who lay on the ground for hours with burns and a cracked skull until he was found, officials said.
Relatives of those still missing stormed an official press conference demanding to know the whereabouts of their loved ones. Families wrote the names of missing persons on posters lining a street outside a temporary shelter near the rescue site.
Earlier Saturday, fires sent plumes of black smoke skyward near where explosions devastated a chemical warehouse in Tianjin on Wednesday.
But officials denied news reports that an evacuation order had been immediately issued for everyone within 1.8 miles (3 kilometers), with Tianjin government spokesman Gong Jiansheng calling the reports “false information.”
The Beijing News, citing the People’s Armed Police Force, had reported the evacuation order. CNN has reported that at least one disaster recovery shelter is located within the reported evacuation zone.
However, photographs made it appear that vehicles in a parking lot had caught fire rather than new explosions having taken place at the warehouse, as the Xinhua news agency had reported.
‘Lessons paid for with blood’
Chinese President Xi Jinping said Saturday that the Tianjin blasts and other recent accidents exposed severe problems in workplace safety and urged authorities to heed “safe growth” and “people’s interest first” in efforts to avoid such accidents, Xinhua reported.
The president also “urged authorities to learn from the ‘extremely profound’ lessons paid for with blood” in the Tianjin explosions, Xinhua reported.
Xi is demanding improvements to workplace safety, the agency added.
The first blasts on Wednesday, one of which carried the equivalent of more than 20 tons of TNT, left more than 700 people injured and thousands homeless, officials said. A man around the age of 40 was reported to have been rescued from the site on Saturday.
Flames at the warehouse appeared Friday to be largely extinguished but residents worried about lingering contamination.
“I asked my in-laws to take my daughter home. I don’t want them to stay here,” Tian Binyan, a migrant worker, said. “I’m worried. I heard it’s going to rain later and that would make the air toxic.”
She was among the 6,000 people displaced by the fire and explosions that rocked the port Wednesday night, sending fireballs many stories high.
CNN
