An explosion in a chemical plant in China left at least 47 dead and dozens wounded

The toll of the victims of the huge explosion in a chemical plant in eastern China rose to 47 dead on Fridaywhich makes it one of the worst industrial accidents in the country in recent years.

The drone footage broadcast Friday by CCTV public television showed an apocalyptic landscape, with charred and severely damaged buildings, a day after the explosion of the factory.

More than 600 people received medical care after the blast, which took place on Thursday afternoon at a Yancheng Industrial Park in Jiangsu Province, said local authorities on their Weibo social network account.

At least 90 of them are seriously injured. The first badessment of the authorities was 6 dead and 23 wounded.

The blast was so powerful that she apparently generated a small earthquake, demolished several buildings in the factory and smashed the windows of the surrounding houses.

This Friday, while the cloud of smoke was still visible, locals around the factory worked hard to remove the rubble from their homes.

"We knew that one day it would explode," said Xiang, a 60-year-old woman who said she was concerned about safety and contamination of the place for a long time.

An AFP team discovered that several police cordones were blocking the main road leading to the place.

The residents of this district of Yancheng, Jiangsu Province, seemed to be left to their own devices in the face of the scale of the damage. Some cried.

Others had to leave everything quickly and spend the night at the hotel, given the severity of the damage done to their home.

The explosion occurred at 14:48 local (06H48 GMT) in the factory of Tianjiayi Chemical Company and was forced to evacuate more than 3,000 inhabitants for fear of toxic emissions. The risk of contamination complicated rescue operations.

The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, which makes a state visit to Italy on Friday, has asked the rescue teams to make "all the necessary efforts" to rescue the many employees who remain trapped under the rubble, according to the news agency Xinhua official.

Cracked walls and broken doors

Tianjiayi Chemical, founded in 2007, has 195 employees and manufactures raw materials such as ansiol, a highly flammable component with an anise-like odor.

Sample of the violence of the explosion, the windows of the houses were broken, the cracked walls and the doors of the garages destroyed within a radius of four kilometers.

The National Center of Seismology reported a magnitude 2.2 earthquake at the time of the disaster.

Authorities announced Friday the opening of an investigation to clarify the causes of the explosion and said that arrests had been made, but they did not specify how many.

The explosion caused a huge fireball several tens of meters high and a thick column of gray smoke, according to images broadcast on social networks.

Accidental blasts in China are common, especially in the industrial sector.

Last November, a gas leak in a chemical factory caused an explosion that caused 23 deaths on Zhangjiakou (north), one of the sites of the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, located about 200 km northwest of the Chinese capital.

In July, another explosion in a chemical plant left 19 dead and 12 wounded in southwest China's Sichuan province. According to the authorities, the company would have started the work without going through the necessary security tests.

But one of the most serious industrial accidents occurred in 2015 in Tianjin, in the north of the country: a huge explosion in a chemical field caused at least 165 deaths in the port city of about 120 km from Beijing.

This industrial site stored some 700 tons of highly toxic sodium cyanide, among thousands of tons of other dangerous chemical compounds.