More than 10,000 villagers were evacuated after a truck loaded with chlorine overturned on a highway in eastern China, spewing a searing chemical fog that killed 28 people and sickened hundreds, the government said yesterday.
The truck was carrying a tank loaded with 30 tonnes of chlorine when it crashed late Tuesday near the city of Huai'an in Jiangsu Province on the main highway linking Beijing and Shanghai, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing local officials.
Some 450 people, dozens of them in critical condition, were being treated for vomiting, dizziness and coughing, the Shanghai Daily reported. Newspaper photos showed women breathing from oxygen tanks in a crowded local hospital, some of them two to a bed.
PHOTO: EPA
The accident added to a string of deadly accidents in China involving chlorine and other gases.
A leak of toxic fumes from a damaged gas well in the country's southwest killed 243 people in December 2003. Last March, a chlorine tank exploded in the industrial city of Chongqing, killing nine people and forcing 150,000 to flee their homes.
The truck carrying the chlorine tank overturned Tuesday after a tire blew out and it struck another truck near Huai'an, Xinhua said. News photos showed the tank lying in the road, while firefighters in oxygen masks tried to move it with a heavy-duty crane.
The driver of the second truck was killed instantly, news reports said.
The tank truck's driver fled as a "ghostly white haze" spread along the road, the Shanghai Daily said. It said he later surrendered to police, but authorities believed the failure to report the disaster immediately delayed rescue and clean-up work.
Chlorine forms a yellow-green gas that burns the skin and eyes and can kill by damaging the lungs, according to the Web site of the US National Institutes of Health.
The tank was moved to another site by late Wednesday but was still leaking gas, the newspaper said.
Earlier, emergency crews dragged the tank into a ditch, surrounded it with a sandbag dike and drenched it in alkaline liquid in an attempt to stop the chlorine from blowing away, said an official reached by phone at the Huai'an fire department headquarters.
The rescue effort involved more than 100 firefighters, more than 10 of whom had to be treated for exposure to the gas, said the official, who wouldn't give his name.
The provincial government ordered an investigation, the report said.
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
A former television news host and six military personnel — active and retired — have been indicted on espionage charges, Kaohsiung prosecutors said yesterday. Lin Chen-you (林宸佑), a former CTi News host and YouTuber, last year allegedly made videos at the direction of a Chinese agent criticizing the Democratic Progressive Party’s recall campaign, the Ciaotou District Prosecutors’ Office told a news conference in Kaohsiung. He allegedly received 4,325 tether coins for the videos from an unidentified person surnamed Huang (黃), believed to be an agent of a hostile foreign power, they said. Lin, also known as Ma Te (馬德), has a show named
RSS