Chinese Poultry Factory Was Considered a Model

A leak of ammonia gas used for preservation of meat in cold storage might have led to the explosion on Monday, which resulted in what state news media called the worst workplace fire in many years. Any problem in ammonia storage or other workplace conditions did not appear to have been spotted or publicized by officials.

Homages to the company, Jilin Baoyuanfeng Poultry, appeared in postings over the last several years on the Web site of the government of Dehui, the municipality in northeast China’s Jilin Province where the factory is.

In October 2010, the head of the local anticorruption body of the Communist Party visited the company to research workplace conditions, according to a statement from Dehui propaganda officials posted on the municipal Web site. The official, Zhao Wenbo, found the company’s “progress into becoming a nationally known enterprise and the growth of its production inspiring,” the post said. For years, Dehui has been promoting itself as a center of commercial agriculture, animal feed production and food processing.

A different post from the same year on the Dehui site asserted that “through an advanced management concept and business model, the company quickly entered into healthy development.” It said the Jilin provincial government had called the company one of the “top 100 agricultural processing companies,” while the provincial capital of Changchun had labeled it a “leading enterprise” in agricultural industrialization, a title that it also held in 2011.

Those assessments suggested that officials had missed or ignored conditions that led to the disaster.

People familiar with the factory were cited by Chinese state news media on Tuesday as saying that safety measures were poor or nonexistent. The death toll rivaled some of the more horrendous accidents in China’s notoriously unsafe mining industry.

Officials have avoided granting interviews, but some details began to emerge in official media reports on Tuesday of the conditions of the factory. A report by Xinhua, the state news agency, said that Changchun officials had concluded at a meeting that working conditions were too crowded, fire escape routes and procedures were poor, and inspections substandard. Much of the factory had been built from flammable materials, so “the risk of fire was very large,” Xinhua reported.

A report on Tuesday afternoon by Xinhua said medical workers at the site had found a main cause of death was ammonia poisoning — many of the workers had been found with swollen respiratory tracts. Witnesses had said the previous day they had heard one or more explosions. A leak of ammonia caused the initial explosion, and then more gas leaked, according to state media reports.

The accident was so large that China’s top leaders intervened. Xinhua said Prime Minister Li Keqiang met with provincial officials at the emergency command center of the State Council, China’s cabinet. Earlier, Xi Jinping, the party chief and state president, had called for an investigation while he was traveling abroad. Xinhua reported that 77 people were being treated in Changchun for injuries.

A handful of survivors’ accounts emerged on the Internet, painting a picture of mad efforts to escape an inferno consuming a warren of rooms and hallways. “Everyone was falling over in the corridors,” said Wang Xiujuan, according to a Xinhua report. “You tread on me, I tread on you, it was very chaotic. Everyone was crawling out, using all their might to crawl out.”

Tencent, a popular Internet portal, published interviews that two survivors had done via microblogs with Internet users. One man, Guan Zhiguo, said the workers had not been warned about workplace hazards, including the ammonia.

Mia Li and Sue-Lin Wong contributed research.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/world/asia/chinese-poultry-factory-was-considered-a-model.html?partner=rss&emc=rss