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A fire, potentially the most dangerous in Shanghai in recent years, broke out yesterday at the Shanghai Petrochemical Co., Ltd in the city's southwestern Jingshan District, but no deaths have been reported, company officials and firefighters said.
The blaze erupted at an ethene manufacturing workshop at 10:30 am, causing at least three consecutive explosions within 15 minutes, witnesses said.
Firefighters arrived within 10 minutes and contained the blaze from the other ethene production facilities, company officials said. At least seven fire fighting trucks were mobilized.
They extinguished the fire by 4:30 pm, officials said.
A company spokesman said the workshop was operating automatically at the time of the fire, so no workers should be injured.
Officials at a nearby company said they had received no injured workers.
The cause of the fire is under investigation. A financial estimate of the fire damage was not available yesterday. Had the fire spread to the other chemical workshops, the potential for loss of life and monetary loss would have been "enormous," company officials said.
Shanghai Petrochemical Co., Ltd boasted of modernized ethene production facilities, with an annual output of 700,000 tons.
The facilities were established just two months ago, and the products were expected to export to Japan, company officials said.
(China Daily July 24, 2002)
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