A chemical factory blast injured at least two workers in Harbin, capital of northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, on Thursday afternoon, testing the nerves of local people once again.

 

The accident took place at about 3:30 PM, when three of nine chemical tanks in the factory's yard caught fire and two others exploded on the northern bank of the Songhua River, the local Life Daily reported on Friday without identifying the factory.

 

It took firefighters about 5 hours to contain the blaze, it said. However, factory management officials all fled after the blast.

 

"If all the tanks exploded, space within 500 square meters of the factory would have been leveled and destroyed completely," Fang Jun, a fire control officer on the spot, was quoted as saying.

 

"All the injured people have been hospitalized, and investigations of the blast are under way," an official with the city's work safety committee, who declined to be identified, said on Friday.

 

Wang Xiaodong, 38, one of the victims whose face was seriously burnt, has been in a coma since Thursday, said Yang Xinbo, a doctor at the Harbin No 5 Hospital, where the injured were receiving medical treatment.

 

The chemicals in the tanks were marked as "low-rate toxins," said the paper, without identifying them by name.

 

Air samples from the blast site have been collected and sent to a provincial environmental examination station for further testing, an official with the Harbin environmental protection bureau told China Daily on Friday.

 

The newspaper did not say if any chemicals flowed into the Songhua River, which is the only water supply for Harbin.

 

The river was polluted last November when about 100 tons of toxic benzene spilled after a petrochemical plant explosion in neighboring Jilin Province.

 

(China Daily April 8, 2006)