Last Wednesday, Aug. 12, people living near the coast of
Bohai Bay, in the southeast part of the port city of Tianjin, were awaked by
the sound of sirens and the flickering of a fire. A chemical warehouse on the bay was ablaze, and several
residents got out their smartphones and videoed the impressive conflagration as
it illuminated nearby apartment and office buildings. At 11:30 PM, eyewitnesses saw a blinding flash as a huge
detonation went off, followed a few seconds later by an even bigger one that
registered 2.3 on the Richter scale of seismographs many miles away. Acres of new cars awaiting shipments
were incinerated, huge shipping containers were tossed around like matchsticks,
and
as of this writing (Sunday Aug. 16), the confirmed death
toll from the explosions has reached 112, with 90 more reported missing. Hundreds have been injured, many
seriously, and evacuations and property damage have rendered several thousand
residents temporarily homeless.
Sodium cyanide, a highly toxic chemical, has been detected in the port's
sewer system and the sewage outflow leading to Bohai Bay has been cut off.
At this point, there are more questions than answers, as
reporters who attended a news conference called after the tragedy learned
before officials abruptly ended the conference. Why was such a dangerous collection of chemicals stored
within 2,000 feet of a residential area?
What was in the warehouse that exploded? And last but not least, how can such a tragedy be prevented
from happening again?
A chemical fire is one of the firefighter's worst
nightmares, even when the nature of the chemicals is known. The warehouse that exploded was owned
by the Rui Hai International Logistics Company, which was unable to provide
officials with a complete inventory of what was in the building when it caught
fire. Records indicated that the
firm had a license to store calcium carbide, which produces highly flammable acetylene
gas when it gets wet. And sodium
cyanide is not something you want to spread around either—an amount the size of
a single small pill can kill you.
If there is enough left of the warehouse and its records to investigate,
we will probably find out that there was a lot of something—ammonium nitrate,
perhaps—stored in one big pile that went off all at once. Sadly, many of the fatalities were in
the ranks of the first responders who approached the warehouse with fire hoses
after the first alarm was turned in.
Some of their bodies may never be recovered.
Years ago, in the late 1980s, I visited Tianjin during a
trip related to my research activities.
My first impression of the city came as we emerged from an underground
railway station into a square which was dominated by a strange assortment of
suspended wires that I recognized immediately as a shortwave transmitting
antenna. This was back when
shortwave radio was one of the main ways that people in totalitarian countries
could get news that wasn't controlled by the government. Accordingly, the government erected
local shortwave jamming stations that tried to cover up Voice of America
broadcasts with racket that sounded like a battle between two buzz saws. Control of outside information is a lot
harder nowadays because of the Internet, and the government of China has quit
trying to suppress undesirable information completely, as the aborted news
conference proves. But just
knowing how awful an accident is doesn't guarantee that something will be done
about it. Can we expect this
horrific disaster to lead to any improvements in safety? That depends.
One thing that is clear beyond a doubt: people all over China and the rest of
the world know how bad this explosion was. And at a minimum, the residents of Tianjin are going to
demand changes in the way the port operates and keeps track of hazardous
materials. Sometimes local
politics in China is a lot more quasi-democratic than you would expect from a
nominally totalitarian government system, in that incompetent heads roll and
genuine reforms can take place if public pressure is great enough.
The larger question is whether the Tianjin explosion will
create a drive toward safer operation of industrial facilities in general
across China. The pollution
problems in Chinese cities are notorious, with one expert estimating that 16 of
the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. Lacking a formal means of influencing
their government through meaningful elections, the Chinese people have taken to
mounting lots of protests, and one Chinese Communist Party official estimated
that in 2012 alone, about 50,000 environmental protests took place. This is evidence of a great deal of
frustration on the part of the country's citizens, who have enjoyed tremendous
economic growth in the past few decades, but have paid the price by living in
overcrowded, polluted, and increasingly dangerous cities.
There isn't much that is nice about a totalitarian
government, but you can say this—once the people in power make up their minds
to do something, they can go ahead and do it without a lot of compromises and
political bargaining. If Beijing
wants to enact much stricter regulations about the types of chemicals stored in
port warehouses such as Rui Hai's, they can do so tomorrow. But regulations alone aren't enough.
Tragedies similar to the Tianjin explosions here in the U.
S., such as the fertilizer-plant explosion in West, Texas in April of 2013,
have emphasized how important it is for accurate inventory information to be
available at all times to first responders, who in turn need to be educated
about the various dangers and appropriate techniques that should be applied in
case of a chemical fire. Ideally,
the Rui Hai warehouse would have been constructed and equipped with sprinkler
and alarm systems so that it wouldn't have caught fire in the first place, or
at least the fire could have been extinguished before it got out of
control. But despite the best
precautions, chemical fires sometimes get out of hand. In that case, fire departments need to
know when to try to fight a fire, what to fight it with, and when to look at
the online inventory and decide, "Let's issue an evacuation order and clear
out ourselves too—this is too dangerous." But there has to be an accurate online inventory and first
responders who are trained to know what to do and when to do it.
These things are not rocket science, but they represent a
change in the way people do things.
Let's hope that not only in Tianjin, but all across China, the sad
lessons of last week's explosions lead to safer ports and better information
exchange in the future.
Sources: I referred to news reports on the
disaster carried by CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/15/asia/china-tianjin-explosions/,
the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/world/asia/rising-anger-but-few-answers-after-explosions-in-tianjin.html,
NBC News at http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/tianjin-china-explosion-area-evacuated-over-sodium-cyanide-fears-n410371,
and the Wikipedia articles on "Tianjin explosions" and
"Environmental issues in China."
No comments:
Post a Comment