Huge blasts kill at least 50, injure hundreds in China

The official Xinhua says 701 people have been hospitalised, 71 of them in critical condition

Enormous explosions at a chemical warehouse in a major Chinese port city killed at least 50 people and injured more than 700, official media said Thursday, leaving a devastated landscape of incinerated cars, toppled shipping containers and burnt-out buildings.

An AFP reporter in Tianjin saw shattered glass up to three kilometres (two miles) from the site of the blast, a storage facility for dangerous goods where the detonation unleashed a vast fireball that dwarfed towers in the area, lit up the night sky and rained debris on the city.

The explosion was felt several kilometres away, even being picked up by a Japanese weather satellite, and images showed walls of flame enveloping buildings and rank after rank of gutted cars at an import facility.

An aerial picture of smoke rising at the site of the explosions is seen at the Binhai new district, Tianjin, August 13, 2015. PHOTO: REUTERS

"When I felt the explosion I thought it was an earthquake," resident Zhang Zhaobo told AFP. "I ran to my father and I saw the sky was already red. All the glass was broken, and I was really afraid."

Residents, some partially clothed, ran for shelter on a street strewn with debris.

"I heard the first explosion and everyone went outside, then there was a series of more explosions, windows shattered and a lot of people who were inside were hurt and came running out, bleeding," 27-year-old Huang Shiting, who lives close to the site, told AFP.

Paramedics stretchered the injured into the city's hospitals as doctors bandaged up victims, many of them covered in blood.

Citing rescue headquarters, the official Xinhua news agency said 50 people had been killed, including at least 12 firefighters.

Scores of firefighters were already on the scene before the explosion, responding to a fire.

At one city hospital a doctor wept over a dead firefighter still in uniform, his skin blackened from smoke, as he was wheeled past along with two other bodies.

Xinhua said 701 people were hospitalised, 71 of them in critical condition.

Mei Xiaoya, 10, and her mother were turned away from the first hospital they went to because there were too many people, she told AFP.

"I'm not afraid, it's just a scratch," she said pointing to the bandage on her arm. "But mum was hurt badly, she couldn't open her eyes."

Plumes of smoke still billowed over buildings hours after the blast, which occurred shortly before midnight local time.

"Of course I was afraid, how can you not be afraid?" said a man as he looked at his apartment block behind a police cordon. "I ran. I grabbed my child and my wife and ran."

The blaze was brought "under initial control" on Thursday afternoon, Xinhua cited the public security ministry as saying, after 1,000 firefighters and 143 fire engines had been deployed to the site.

A 217-strong specialist nuclear, bacteriological and chemical warfare military unit arrived to help with the clean-up operation, Xinhua said.

But officials were unable to say what triggered the initial fire or the subsequent explosions.

Xinhua described the facility as a storage and distribution centre of containers of dangerous goods, including chemicals.

Executives from its owner, Tianjin Dongjiang Port Rui Hai International Logistics, were taken into custody by police, it said.

Wen Wurui, head of Tianjin's environment protection bureau, told a televised briefing that "poisonous and harmful" chemicals had been detected in the air.

He said they were not at levels "excessively high above standards".

But environmental campaign group Greenpeace warned that substances from the site could be dangerous, saying it was "critical" that the potential toxins in the air were monitored closely.

State broadcaster CCTV said that President Xi Jinping had urged "all-out efforts to rescue victims and extinguish the fire".

China has a dismal industrial safety record as some factory and warehouse owners evade regulations to save money and pay off corrupt officials to look the other way.

In 2013, a pipeline explosion at state-owned oil refiner Sinopec's facility in the eastern port of Qingdao killed 62 people and injured 136.

In July this year, 15 people were killed and more than a dozen injured when an illegal fireworks warehouse exploded in the northern province of Hebei, which neighbours Tianjin.

And 146 were killed in an explosion at a car parts factory in Kunshan, near Shanghai, in August last year.

Tianjin, about 140 kilometres (90 miles) southeast of Beijing, is one of China's biggest cities, with a population of nearly 15 million people, according to 2013 figures.

A manufacturing centre and major port for northern China, it is closely linked to Beijing, with a high-speed train line cutting the travel time between them to only 30 minutes.

Several countries were granted trading "concessions" there, as they were in Shanghai, during the 19th and early 20th centuries -- settlements that were administered by a foreign power -- starting with Britain and France in 1860.

Tianjin's city centre retains a legacy of historic colonial architecture, along with more recent skyscrapers.