Fire kills 119 at China plant

Associated Press

BEIJING

A swift-moving fire trapped panicked workers inside a poultry slaughterhouse in northeastern China that had only a single open exit, killing at least 119 people in one of the country’s worst industrial disasters in years.

Survivors described workers, mostly women, struggling through smoke and flames to reach doors that turned out to be locked or blocked.

One worker, 39-year-old Guo Yan, said the emergency exit at her workstation could not be opened, and she was knocked to the ground in the crush of workers searching for a way to escape the fire Monday. “I could only crawl desperately forward,” Guo was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.

The accident highlights the high human costs of China’s lax industrial safety standards, which continue to endanger workers despite recent improvements in the country’s work-safety record.

Besides the dead, dozens were injured in the blaze in Jilin province’s Mishazi township, which appeared to have been sparked by three early-morning explosions, Xinhua said. The provincial fire department attributed the blasts to an ammonia leak. The chemical is kept pressurized as part of the cooling system in meat processing plants.

The disaster killed 119 people and injured a further 70, Xinhua said Tuesday.

A provincial government media official, who refused to give his name, said he expected the death toll to rise as more bodies were recovered.