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SHANGHAI (awp/afp) – Authorities in Shanghai on Saturday announced an investigation to determine the cause of a fire at a chemical plant that left one dead and one injured, the first major industrial accident since the city lifted confinement at the beginning of June.
The fire that broke out at dawn on Saturday at Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co., in the outlying district of Jinshan, southwest of Shanghai, was brought under control in a few hours, according to the news agency Chine Nouvelle.
“According to our first information, the fire has already caused one death,” the agency said. “Fire protection measures are currently underway,” the same source added.
Shanghai authorities announced that a “protective burn is underway” and that “security risks” were “controllable”, on social media. They added that their emergency management office had launched an investigation into the cause of the crash.
The company said for its part on Saturday afternoon that it was cooperating with the investigation. According to her, the closure of the facilities concerned “will not have a significant impact on the market”.
She specified that the deceased was a driver of a transport vehicle for a third-party company and added that one of her employees had been slightly injured.
A drone video, which a resident provided to AFP, shows thick clouds of smoke above the vast industrial area with three separate fires, in separate buildings.
The fire broke out as Shanghai, the economic capital of China, cautiously resumes its activity after being completely confined for two months in response to an epidemic outbreak of Covid-19, which led to the closure of factories and supply chain disruptions.
According to local media, residents of this petrochemical plant heard an explosion, followed by a fire.
Videos circulating on social media show a thick cloud of smoke and ash rising into the sky.
The refinery is located near the seafront, not far from a natural park.
“Half the sky was filled with red fire and thick black smoke, there was dust and cotton-like things floating in the air,” a resident told the Upstream News newspaper in London. Chongqing.
“You could hear the sound of the flames, a huge roar like the sound of an airplane in flight,” he added.
The Shanghai Fire Department announced on Weibo, the local equivalent of Twitter, that it had dispatched more than 500 people to the scene immediately, while the Ministry of Emergency Management dispatched experts, CCTV reported.
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