When work becomes a lethal hell

By Liu Dong Source:Global Times Published: 2013-1-17 18:18:01

 

A worker walks past an operating blast furnace. Photo: CFP
A worker walks past an operating blast furnace. Photo: CFP



On the first day of 2013, 38-year-old steel worker Li Bin, died leaving a wife and a 15-year-old child behind. Fifteen days before his death Li Bin had been working as usual at Baosteel's manufacturing plant in Shanghai's Baoshan district.

He and his fellow workers had been working exactly as they had done for years when suddenly, in the morning on December 17, a nightmare exploded. As they moved a refinery wagon containing molten iron along tracks, the contraption suddenly tipped, splashing 270 tons of molten metal around the area. Two workers died at the scene, unable to escape. More than 10 others suffered injuries in the accident but Li Bin was the most seriously injured.

Despite every effort at the No.3 People's Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, it proved impossible to save him. Ninety-nine percent of his total body surface area was burnt - burns of more than 15 percent are regarded as life-threatening by experts.

Li's funeral was held on January 8, the third funeral for the victims of the accident, a rare major industrial accident for China's largest steel enterprise.

Five days before Li Bin's death, the Shanghai municipal government announced the results of an initial investigation, which stated that accident was caused by a mechanical fault involving a failure of the hook which was attached to the wagon of molten ore.

According to Shen Weizhong, deputy director of the Shanghai Administration of Work Safety, a final report will be published when further technical evaluations have been completed. Shen told a news conference: "If anyone is found to have been guilty of misconduct or dereliction of duty, we will begin court action." 

Lost breadwinners

That is little comfort for the three families who have lost their breadwinners and the victims' friends. "I still can't believe that they are gone," Wang Gang (not his real name), one of their colleagues, told the Global Times. He went to all three funerals. He said the two who died at the scene of the accident were 22-year-old Li Zhuzhu from Jiangsu Province and 35-year-old Liu Jun from Hubei Province.

"I had just done a morning shift with Liu Jun the day before the accident. And all three were very close to me. We were always joking with each other. I never imagined that this could happen," he said.

Liu Jun was a father of two children and Li Zhuzhu had just returned from his hometown after meeting his fiancée for the first time, a date arranged by a matchmaker.

Wang said there were nine teams working each shift at the plant. Four teams looked after the refining operations and another four looked after the movement of the iron slag and molten ore, carrying this in special wagons. The other team coordinates the process. Li Bin, Liu Jun and Li Zhuzhu belonged to the team that moved the wagons of molten ore. When the accident happened, they were about to take the molten ore out of the area.

"The molten iron is thousands of degrees hot and when it hits air it evaporates and explodes. Anyone near it will be melted immediately. It would have been like hell and no one can imagine how awful it was," Wang said.

Zhang Rui and Deng Zuheng are two of the workers wounded in the accident and they are still being treated in hospital. Zhang lost most of the skin from his face but this is now regrowing. Deng still cannot move his finger freely because of his injuries.

"The fire and the superheated steam and iron ash suddenly exploded and splashed everywhere. We couldn't see anything and didn't know what was happening but just tried to get out of the plant as quickly as we could," Deng told the Global Times.

Deng and Zhang belonged to the equipment maintenance team. When the accident happened, they were working on the eighth floor cleaning equipment but even so they suffered injuries.

"I have been working in Baosteel for more than 15 years and I've never heard of any accident like this," Deng said.

Faulty equipment

According to Wang Gang, the faulty hook had been reported several months ago in a routine equipment check. The report said the equipment needed to be replaced. But this did not happen, apparently. "We would like to know why didn't the company change it in time?"

Baosteel Group's press office has refused to comment on the issue until the government's final report is issued.

Guo Chaohui is the chief researcher at the Baosteel Technology Center and told the Global Times that there had never been an accident like this since the enterprise was established in 1977. He said the causes of most heavy industry accidents in operations like Baosteel could be divided into two kinds - those due to technical problems and those where operating rules had been disregarded.

"Statistics shows 90 percent of industrial accidents are caused by people disregarding the rules. Although we have meetings every day before work to remind workers about the safety issues, people do get careless over time," he said, adding that on this occasion he tended to believe that the problem was aged equipment that had not been replaced in time.

Baosteel has more than 130,000 employees working in plants and offices across the country. The company is regarded as the country's leading enterprise in the iron and steel industry in terms of production levels and advanced technology.  

However, only last year, there was another major accident involving Baosteel. In February 2012, a Baosteel company in Nanjing had a gas poisoning incident which killed six and injured seven. The accident was found to have been the result of workers ignoring safety regulations.

A high risk industry

"The iron and steel industry is a high risk industry," said Yang Yitao, deputy director of the Department of Material Engineering at Shanghai University. "But the Baosteel accident might have revealed lax management."

According to the Xinhua News Agency, MCC Baosteel Technology Services Corporation, a company jointly established by the China Metallurgical Group Corporation and Baosteel Group in 2006, was largely responsible for equipment maintenance, metallurgy equipment manufacturing and steel slag utilization.

"The metal production environment is very harsh and tough. To reduce incidents caused by either man-made errors or equipment failure, more technology like robots should be introduced," Yang said.

"But the accident did expose poor management practices and a major cause of that was the general decline of the iron and steel industry in 2012. The downbeat economic performance had affected most iron companies in every way," Yang said. 

The China Iron and Steel Association reported 5.22 billion yuan ($840 million) profit loss in the first 10 months of 2012 for 80 major iron and steel companies in the country.

Other accidents

This was not the only industrial accident in Shanghai last year. On December 10, a fourth-floor factory of a clothing company in Minhang district collapsed after unapproved renovation work. Three people died in the disaster.

On December 18, a large aquarium in a shopping center on Nanjing Road East burst, injuring 15 people. The official report said the accident was caused by ultraviolet radiation and changing temperatures which had weakened the acrylic glass over time. The acrylic sheets had become brittle and fractured because of cold temperatures.

On December 31 a storage room on a subway Line 12 construction site collapsed, killing five people and injuring 18.

"This shows our work safety management still has a lot of loopholes," Shen Weizhong from the Shanghai Administration of Work Safety told the December news conference.

Shen said that by the end of November 2012, there had been 2,773 industrial accidents in Shanghai claiming 448 lives although this was fewer than the previous year.

In response to public concerns about work safety, the Shanghai municipal government introduced new regulations on January 1. The regulations, which focus on detecting and correcting any potential work safety problems in the city, listed three levels of accident threats and detailed the responsibility for these. Businesses can be fined up to 200,000 yuan if they are in noncompliance.

Observers say the regulations are timely as the Chinese Spring Festival approaches but insisted that enforcement was the key. "Work safety should always be on our minds - nobody wants to see a tragedy like this again," said professor Yang from the Shanghai University.

 



Posted in: Metro Shanghai

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