A septic tank was the epicenter of a massive explosion that rocked one of China’s largest port cities on Sunday, killing two people and injuring at least 19, authorities have said.
The blast tore through a crumbling light-industrial area adjacent to crowded residential towers in the city of Ningbo, just south of Shanghai, and was so powerful that it was heard several kilometers away.
The force of the explosion shattered windows in nearby apartments, mangled cars and reduced small buildings at the epicenter to rubble, though locals said the structures were already in poor shape and slated for demolition.
Public security officials “have confirmed that the blast’s epicenter is a septic tank in an empty field,” the local government said in a statement late on Sunday.
Methane and hydrogen sulphide — both highly flammable gases — can build up in septic tanks.
Officials have ruled out a gas explosion or of the blast being intentionally set off by someone.
The statement said in addition to the two fatalities, two people are missing after the explosion. Four people were severely injured and 15 others had minor wounds.
“We were having tea and bwaaaah! It knocked my mother off her stool. It was incredibly loud,” said a local woman who lives about 400m from the blast site and who gave only her surname, Wu.
Authorities had thrown up a cordon around the collapsed buildings and were still investigating the cause of the explosion in Ningbo.
An elderly woman said one of her children was in the area at the time of the blast.
“Yes, we live here and one of my children is still inside [the cordoned-off area] and hasn’t been found yet,” she said, declining to give details.
She dabbed tears with a tissue and repeatedly dialed a number on her phone.
Asked who she was calling, she said: “My child.”
Early yesterday, locals were sweeping up piles of debris and glass at the blast site where rubble was strewn across an area several hundred meters wide. The government said it had received hundreds of reports of damage, such as shattered glass, twisted window frames or damaged cars.
The local government and state media have variously described the site of the explosion as a vacant lot or an abandoned factory.
An Agence France-Presse reporter at the scene said the site appeared to be a run-down former light industrial area.
Residents said some people from outside Ningbo had been squatting there, but others disputed that.
“Most people had left here a long time ago. It was just a wasteland lot,” Wu said.
She said most structures in the blast area had been crumbling for some time,and that not all the rubble seen was caused by the explosion.
Another local man, who declined to give his name, said: “It’s lucky that more people did not die, but no one was living here anymore.”
China has been rocked by several industrial accidents in recent years.
In 2015, giant chemical blasts in a container storage facility killed at least 165 people in the northern port city of Tianjin.
The explosions caused more than US$1 billion in damage and sparked widespread anger at a perceived lack of transparency over the accident’s causes and its environmental impact.
A government inquiry eventually recommended 123 people be punished. Tianjin’s mayor at the time of the accident was sentenced to 12 years in prison for graft in September.
A French-Algerian man went on trial in France on Monday for burning to death his wife in 2021, a case that shocked the public and sparked heavy criticism of police for failing to take adequate measures to protect her. Mounir Boutaa, now 48, stalked his Algerian-born wife Chahinez Daoud following their separation, and even bought a van he parked outside her house near Bordeaux in southwestern France, which he used to watch her without being detected. On May 4, 2021, he attacked her in the street, shot her in both legs, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. A neighbor hearing
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ¥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this