Chinese authorities yesterday warned that cyanide levels in the waters around the Tianjin Port explosion site had risen to as much as 277 times acceptable levels although they declared that the city’s drinking water was safe.
The local government, under pressure from China’s leaders in Beijing to improve industrial safety, also said it would relocate chemical plants away from the area, where thousands of residents were forced to evacuate last week after the release of toxic chemicals by explosions that killed 114 people.
China’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee called on all levels of governments during a special meeting yesterday to do more to implement and monitor industrial safety rules, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
“Recently, there’s been a series of serious accidents in certain places, once again exposing grave safety risks,” Xinhua quoted from the meeting, which was called by President Xi Jinping to address the Tianjin explosions.
A report from the Tianjin Environmental Protection Bureau issued on Wednesday said that tests conducted the day before showed that cyanide levels in the river, sea and waste water in the evacuated area around the explosion site had risen sharply since the deadly blasts. One testing site at the mouth of a rain water pipe recorded cyanide levels 277 times above acceptable standards.
Drinking water in Tianjin, however, met national standards, according to a separate statement from health authorities on Tuesday. The government has confirmed there were about 700 tonnes of the deadly chemical sodium cyanide in the warehouse that blew up late last Wednesday.
Tianjin, the world’s 10th-busiest port, will relocate chemical plants from the Tianjin Binhai New Area where the blasts occurred to the Nangang Industrial Zone, 25 km (15.5 miles) away, according to the official China Daily, citing Tianjin Mayor Huang Xingguo.
Chinese health authorities say city’s drinking water still meets standards
The Communist party’s anti-graft watchdog promised to crack down both on corruption and on those responsible for violating laws and regulations which had led to the explosions, but stressed the importance of maintaining political stability, according to a statement on the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection website yesterday.
Chinese state media pointed fingers at executives of Ruihai, the company which owns the chemical warehouses, over the disaster, saying they used connections to obtain fire safety and environmental approvals. The Tianjin government announced that after days of investigations, they had determined the warehouses contained 2,500 tonnes of 40 types of dangerous goods, classified into three categories, according to the Xinhua news agency.
There were 1,300 tonnes of potentially explosive oxidising chemicals, including ammonium nitrate and potassium nitrate, 500 tonnes of flammables, including sodium and magnesium, and 700 tonnes of deadly poisons, mainly sodium cyanide. Apartment buildings and a railway station were closer to the warehouse than allowed by Chinese regulations on storing dangerous materials, state media reported.