Qingdao pipeline blasts toll hits 52 as rescue work hampered by rain
Print Edition
The death toll from oil pipeline explosions in the eastern coastal city of Qingdao rose to 52 yesterday, as rain and the close proximity of dangerous gases hampered rescue operations.
Four bodies were found at the scene, raising the death toll from 48 on Saturday.
Rescue teams are still searching for 11 people believed to be missing.
Six of the dead were professional firefighters with the Huangdao oil warehouse of Sinopec, China’s largest oil refiner. Ten of the 136 in hospital are in critical condition.
Ding Haiwei said his 23-year-old wife Chen Na, who was seven months pregnant and injured in the explosion, died in hospital despite doctors’ efforts.
Friday’s blast ripped up roads and sent thick black smoke billowing into the sky, resulting in 18,000 people being evacuated from nearby urban areas.
The complicated situation and the remains of flammable gas at certain sections in the explosion area was hindering the clearing up of debris.
Crude oil began leaking from an underground pipeline operated by Sinopec at 3am on Friday in the city’s Huangdao District, the city government said.
The valves of the Huangdao warehouse were shut about 15 minutes later.
The oil spill then flowed into the rainwater pipe network, which empties into Jiaozhou Bay. Explosions occurred at two locations around 10:30am when workers were clearing the spill. Fires triggered by the blast had been put out by 2pm.
The air quality in monitored areas has returned to normal, the Qingdao Environmental Protection Bureau said yesterday.
There will be no secondary blasts at the scene after close monitoring, Sinopec’s press office said yesterday.
Some of the missing may have fallen into drainage ditches, said Wang Yongping, an Armed Police engineer at the search scene.
He said they had erected three dams on a 2-kilometer drainage ditch to prevent seawater from pouring in.
“The sewage water in the ditch is still rather deep. We cannot work and have to wait until the water is all pumped out,” said Li Yanzhao, head of a rescue team.
The blasts damaged drainage, gas, water and heating supply pipelines, and the repair work was not going to be easy.
“The difficulty is great, so is the pressure (we face),” said a Sinopec worker.
“The floor was shaking and I thought it was an earthquake,” said Zhang Xiufen, a survivor whose first-floor office was more than 10 meters from the nearest pipeline.
Xing Yuqing, a worker with Sinopec’s pipeline storage and transport company, said he saw a hole the size of two hands at the pipeline’s leak site.
Several minutes after he left the site to handle the spill, which was flowing into the sea through the drainage network, he heard two big bangs a few seconds apart.
Sinopec’s board Chairman Fu Chengyu apologized for the accident on Saturday.
He promised all-out efforts to handle the rescue, relief and aftermath and to cooperate with the investigation team of the State Council to find the cause of the accident.
The ruptured pipeline in Qingdao was put into use in July 1986 and is the second pipeline linking Dongying City with Huangdao. The 711-millimeter-diameter pipe is 248.5 kilometers long and has an annual oil transfer capacity of 10 million tons.
Some residents in Huangdao complained they did not know there was an oil pipeline near their residences before the accident.
Others said they were not told what was happening when they smelled oil two hours before the blasts.
There was a concentration of different oil pipelines and dangerous pipes, said Guo Jishan, deputy secretary-general of the Qingdao government. “This time, the explosion of one pipeline affected other nearby pipes. We found the appearance of some other pipelines had changed at the scene.”
This accident is an extremely profound lesson, said the official.
He told reporters on Saturday that relevant departments should launch an overhaul of the pipelines to make sure they do not affect each other.
The crude oil on the sea surface at Jiaozhou Bay has been mostly cleared, but thin oil films remain and have been difficult to remove.
Liu Xiankun, an official of the Qingdao Maritime Bureau, said maritime authorities received the accident report several hours after the leak occurred, delaying the best time for clearing operations.
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