More than 10,000 villagers were evacuated after a truck loaded with chlorine overturned on a highway in eastern China, spewing a searing chemical fog that killed 28 people and sickened hundreds, the government said yesterday.
The truck was carrying a tank loaded with 30 tonnes of chlorine when it crashed late Tuesday near the city of Huai'an in Jiangsu Province on the main highway linking Beijing and Shanghai, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing local officials.
Some 450 people, dozens of them in critical condition, were being treated for vomiting, dizziness and coughing, the Shanghai Daily reported. Newspaper photos showed women breathing from oxygen tanks in a crowded local hospital, some of them two to a bed.
PHOTO: EPA
The accident added to a string of deadly accidents in China involving chlorine and other gases.
A leak of toxic fumes from a damaged gas well in the country's southwest killed 243 people in December 2003. Last March, a chlorine tank exploded in the industrial city of Chongqing, killing nine people and forcing 150,000 to flee their homes.
The truck carrying the chlorine tank overturned Tuesday after a tire blew out and it struck another truck near Huai'an, Xinhua said. News photos showed the tank lying in the road, while firefighters in oxygen masks tried to move it with a heavy-duty crane.
The driver of the second truck was killed instantly, news reports said.
The tank truck's driver fled as a "ghostly white haze" spread along the road, the Shanghai Daily said. It said he later surrendered to police, but authorities believed the failure to report the disaster immediately delayed rescue and clean-up work.
Chlorine forms a yellow-green gas that burns the skin and eyes and can kill by damaging the lungs, according to the Web site of the US National Institutes of Health.
The tank was moved to another site by late Wednesday but was still leaking gas, the newspaper said.
Earlier, emergency crews dragged the tank into a ditch, surrounded it with a sandbag dike and drenched it in alkaline liquid in an attempt to stop the chlorine from blowing away, said an official reached by phone at the Huai'an fire department headquarters.
The rescue effort involved more than 100 firefighters, more than 10 of whom had to be treated for exposure to the gas, said the official, who wouldn't give his name.
The provincial government ordered an investigation, the report said.
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