Residents near Tianjin blasts site in deep distress
- By Chen Xia
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E-mail China.org.cn, August 19, 2015
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| A military specialist in handling nuclear and biochemical materials decontaminates at a residential community near the core area of the warehouse explosion site in Tianjin, north China, Aug. 18, 2015. [Photo / Xinhua] |
Two massive blasts in a warehouse in Tianjin last Wednesday night had killed 114 people as of Tuesday morning. They also affected 17,000 households, and forced at least 6,000 residents in nearby communities to leave their homes.
A week after the disaster, the residents are in still deep distress, as they have no clue how the disaster happened and how to resume normal life.
“Nobody told us there were chemicals here,” said 27-year-old Liu Xuerui, who bought an apartment near the explosion site in 2013.
Liu's residential community, Vanke Haigangcheng, was the nearest to the warehouse. The direct distance between the complex and the explosion site was no more than 600 meters.
However, according to the current laws in China, large and medium-sized warehouses for dangerous chemicals should be at least 1,000 meters away from public buildings.
People have been questioning why the operator of the warehouse, Ruihai International Logistics Co Ltd, was able to bend the rules and build such a dangerous warehouse in such a heavily populated area.
"When we first obtained the land for real estate development, it was only a normal storage yard,” said Yu Liang, president of China Vanke, developer of Haigangcheng. “Neither we nor the residents were notified when it was renovated into a warehouse for chemicals."
This is not the only Ruihai’s wrongdoing, as it has now emerged that the company had also violated many other safety rules when handling dangerous chemicals.
For example, Ruihai’s was allowed to store a maximum of 24 tons of sodium cyanide, but according to Niu Yueguang, vice deputy director of the Fire Department of the Ministry of Public Security, there were around 3,000 tons of dangerous chemicals at the explosion site, including 700 tons of sodium cyanide, 800 tons of ammonium nitrate and 500 tons of potassium nitrate. The storage methods of the chemicals also violated regulations.
The unexploded toxic chemicals now pose a big risk to the environment and people’s health, putting residents on the edge of their nerves when they returned home to fetch daily necessities and valuable belongings in the days after the blasts.
Some of the residents went to live with their relatives and some are in shelters offered by the local government in the aftermath of the disaster. But these are both temporary solutions, and thinking about the future causes them great pain, since their apartments, which might cost all their savings, were ruined during the explosions.
"The building was shaking, the windows shattered and the doors were ripped off," said a resident of Haigangcheng surnamed Cui, asserting that his family would definitely not move back into the blast-damaged apartment.
"And I don't think anybody would buy the apartment, even if I offered to resell it at half price," he said.
Local authorities have put in place emergency measures, including subsidies for the affected residents so they can rent temporary housing for the next three months. But some residents rejected the offer and appealed the government to "repurchase" their houses on the grounds of safety considerations.
However, their requests were denied by the local government, as the "repurchases would not be possible unless the houses are uninhabitable."
The developer of the blast-affected residential areas also has no compensation plans so far, because "the damage is still pending professional evaluation, and therefore it's too early to discuss compensation."
"We have too many questions to ask. We were also the victims, and now we don't know what to do," said Liu Xuerui.
"I deserve an explanation about why the warehouse was built near my home without my knowledge," said Zhang Lu, who lived near the blast site.
"Whether the warehouses are relocated or not, and however the government offers to help fix the damage, I am not going back. I only want to put the nightmare behind me," Zhang said.
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