Society

Explosives blast highway; 4 dead

By Yan Jie in Beijing and Zhou Lihua in Xiaogan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-12-07 07:43

A truck carrying chili peppers lies toppled by the highway explosion in Hubei province on Saturday. [Xinhua]

Three men abandoned their truck on a major highway early Saturday and ran for their lives, afraid that their cargo was going to explode.

On their truck was five metric tons of gunpowder for manufacturing fireworks, and the driver had spotted a growing fire at the back of the truck seconds earlier.

Ten minutes later, at about 12:20 am, an explosion ripped through the air, waking up sleeping residents within a 40-km radius.

The truck was in shreds, with parts of it found 300 m away. The explosion left a crater of more than 100 sq m at the epicenter and cracks of up to 70 cm wide on the surface of the road nearby.

The blast that took place near the city of Xiaogan in Hubei province killed four people immediately and injured six on the highway, including one seriously wounded, according to an unnamed spokesman for the Xiaogan municipal government.

The explosion also damaged more than 300 houses in 10 nearby villages and injured at least 29 villagers, local officials said. The villagers, including one pregnant woman, have been hospitalized.

"My husband and I were sleeping when the door to our bedroom bounced onto the bed and crashed on my husband's legs," said a woman surnamed Tang, from the village of Yuegang, at the First People's Hospital in Xiaogan.

"We thought it was an earthquake."

Despite being in pain, Tang and her husband rushed out of their home and found that the highway 200 m away from their house was ablaze.

Her husband's leg was broken, Tang said.

Zhang Pingyuan, the owner of the gunpowder, and two drivers, Liu Oushan and Wu Yueping, have been detained on suspicion of perpetration with dangerous items, local police said.

The cause of the accident is being investigated. Police suspect that the gunpowder spontaneously ignited. Gunpowder can start to burn spontaneously if it is not kept dry.

The trio violated the laws regarding the transportation of explosives, local media reported.

The two drivers suffered leg injuries in the blast that sent shards of metal shooting through the air, although they had run nearly 200 m away from the truck. The cargo owner was not injured.

Just before the explosion, Liu, one of the drivers, spotted the fire at the right rear of the truck in the rear-view mirror, Zhang told the police after being detained.

Liu woke Zhang and Wu, stopped the truck and reportedly started to run, without trying to put out the fire or warn others on the expressway of the impending disaster.

The four deaths came from a truck loaded with chili peppers that was passing by in the opposite direction. The blast toppled the pepper truck and another carrying steel into the roadside ditch.

The two trucks were destroyed.

The accident paralyzed the highway that connects Beijing and Zhuhai of Guangdong province for at least four hours, as the road surface was broken up into pieces.

"More than 700 sq m of road surface was blown up," said Zhang Liang, an official with the Hubei Administration Office of the Beijing-Zhuhai Highway.

The local government will pay the villagers affected by the explosion 100,000 yuan ($14,700) for their medical treatment and relocation, Xinhua News Agency reported.

In the village of Yuegang, the roof of a pig farm collapsed because of the blast and two pigs were killed.

The blast was so powerful that residents in Wuhan, Hubei's provincial capital about 40 km away from the epicenter, reported that they had felt a quake-like tremor.

About 100 local villagers profited from the blast by collecting peppers strewn across the ground near the scene of the accident.