At 7:55 on a Thursday morning, a blast furnace at Yingkou Iron and Steel in the Laobian district of Yingkou, in northeast China’s Liaoning province, failed. Four workers died. Five more were hurt and taken to hospital. Video from the scene showed white smoke pouring across the site.
The date was June 22, 2023, though the city’s Emergency Management Bureau only gave the toll on Friday. Its statement named the furnace as the source and said experts had reached a first judgment that equipment had malfunctioned. An investigation into the cause is still running. Hong Kong’s HK01 noted, in passing, that the same company had a casualty accident two years earlier, when a converter blew out.
A bad two days
The steel mill was the second deadly explosion in China in less than a day. On the evening of June 21, a cooking gas blast tore through a barbecue restaurant on a busy street in Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, killing 31 people and injuring seven, as crowds gathered ahead of the Dragon Boat Festival holiday.
Two disasters in two days do not make a trend on their own. The wider record does. Accidents like these are a regular occurrence in China, and the usual explanations are weak government supervision, corruption, cost-cutting by employers and thin safety training for workers. The AP, as relayed by India TV, listed what had come earlier that year: at least nine people killed in an explosion at a petrochemical plant, 53 miners dead in February when a huge open pit coal mine collapsed in Inner Mongolia, and a fire at an industrial trading company in central China the previous November that killed 38 people. Four people were detained over that fire. The Inner Mongolia collapse led to numerous arrests.
What the Yingkou investigation will find is not yet known. An equipment fault is the early finding, which keeps the question wide open: was it a defect, poor maintenance, or a warning someone missed? The official findings will say.
Sources
- Explosion at steel mill kills at least 5 people in northeast China – [İLKHA] Ilke News Agency
- 遼寧鋼鐵企業發生燙傷事故釀4死5傷 兩年前亦曾因轉爐噴爆致傷亡 | 香港01
- China: 4 killed, 5 injured after explosion at steel mill in Yingkou | World – India TV News
