News Story from the Reuters web site.
BEIJING (Reuters) - A gas well blow-out in southwest China turned a
10 square mile area into a death zone, killing nearly 200 people as
they slept or scrambled to escape a cloud of toxic fumes, officials
and state media said Friday.
Bodies of farmers and livestock were scattered over a wide area after
the well, being drilled in mountains 200 miles northeast of Chongqing
city, burst on Tuesday.
"The poisonous gas hovering in the air made an area of 25 sq km
(10 square miles) a death zone as many villagers were intoxicated by
the fumes in their sleep," the China Daily newspaper said. An operation
to seal the gas well planned for Friday had been postponed for 24 hours
to 10 p.m. EST Friday for safety reasons, state media said. About 41,000
people, most of them farmers, were evacuated from villages within a
radius of three miles from the remote accident site, where the temperature
at night drops to freezing. Eighty-two separate rescue teams scoured
surrounding villages for survivors in a search that was due to conclude
early Saturday. Dozens of fire trucks and ambulances stood by.
"They have not found any more dead bodies today," a county
government official told Reuters.
State television showed flames spewing from the well, illuminating
fog-shrouded mountains after the gas was deliberately ignited to consume
it.
"It sounds like an airplane passing by," said a state television
correspondent, standing just 10 meters (33 feet) from the flames as
machinery was being brought in to seal it.
Newspapers showed pictures of children in hospital, their eyes forced
shut by gas, and of dead livestock on roads. Many survivors were poisoned
and had acid burns on their skin and lungs, doctors told the official
the Xinhua news agency. The Chongqing Morning Post quoted one survivor
who lived within 100 yards of the well, he described a hissing black
mist of gas that chased him as he fled in his farm vehicle, with more
than 20 relatives and neighbors hanging on. After driving several kilometers,
he no longer sensed the strange odor of the fumes and stopped his vehicle
to look back, the paper said. "But within just minutes, Liao Yong
again caught whiff of the smell of stinky duck eggs...and hastily drove
on."
BODIES BY ROADSIDE
"Most of the bodies were found at home or by the roadside or
in a valley," the county official said by telephone.
"Chickens, horses and pigs were also killed."
About 740 people were still being treated in hospital while outpatients
with ailments such as conjunctivitis numbered nearly 10,000, the official
said. State media called the accident the worst of its kind in China,
which has a notoriously poor work safety record. A gas blow-out in 1998
in neighboring Sichuan province killed 11 drillers. It was the second
Christmas disaster in three years in China. At least 309 people died
during a Christmas Day disco party when fire swept through a commercial
center in the central city of Luoyang in 2000. When the well erupted,
it spewed a high concentration of natural gas and toxic sulphurated
hydrogen 100 feet into the air.
Only after the gas was set ablaze were rescue workers able to enter
the area, the vice mayor said. He also stated that among the dead were
39 children under 10 and 46 people over 60. Two of the dead were well
workers, the rest were farmers and their families. Chongqing and Sichuan
are among China's major natural gas producing areas. The well where
the blow-out occurred is owned by China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC),
parent of oil major PetroChina.
In one of the world's worst industrial disasters, a poisonous gas leak
at a Union Carbide plant in India in December 1984 killed 3,000 people.
Thousands more died in following years and tens of thousands were left
with lifelong illnesses.
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