A Slow Boat to China

辽宁省铁岭清河特殊钢有限公司， 20多吨钢水冲进工房 32人亡

When most of America’s attention was drawn towards the Virginia Tech story, Fang Jun alerted me to another incident, on the other side of the world, that is just as tragic, although it did not involve human evil displayed by the Blacksburg shootings.

From Eastday: Thirty-two workers were killed and six injured yesterday after they were engulfed in a wave of molten metal in a steel plant in northeast China’s Liaoning Province, safety authorities said.

The mishap occurred at 7:45am in a workshop at the Qinghe Special Steel Corp in Tieling City when a huge ladle used for pouring molten metal sheared off from the blast furnace.

The ladle, two meters in diameter and containing 30 tons of 1,500-degree-Celsius liquid, was moving into pouring position above a work table when it fell. It spilled white-hot molten metal into a room where workers had gathered as they changed shifts.

The liquid metal filled the room, bursting through its door and windows and burying the workers.

Work safety officials who rushed to the site said the bodies of 32 workers had been recovered and the injured taken for hospital treatment.

One of the injured was in a critical condition and the others were stable, doctors said.

Because the bodies were burned beyond recognition, DNA technology will be used for identification, officials said.

The families of the victims will receive at least 200,000 yuan (US$26,000) each in compensation, the officials said.

The cause of the accident was under investigation last night. The plant owner and three employees in charge of work safety have been arrested.

The molten steel was reportedly 1500 degrees C, which poured out of this container:

From Shandong Dazhong, a picture of how the steel flowed into a meeting room and killed the workers:

1) The container full of molten steel fell from a distance of 2-3 meters high while being moved.
2) Tons of molten steel poured into the conference room just as a duty meeting began.
3) All the workers inside the conference room (several dozen of them) were killed.

Just as Fang Jun compared the stories in America and in China, another blogger offered this comment:

33-32=1. Is the difference really no more than 1？
Over these couple of days, each news outlet has been repeatedly covering the shooting at a Virginia campus which took 33 lives. At the beginning it was reported that the suspect was Chinese, which worried a lot of people, but in the end it was determined to be a Korean. This let everyone breathe a sigh of relief and relax.

Soon after the incident, Li [Changchun] called Secretary of State Rice to offer his condolences, and now Hu Jintao called President Bush to offer his condolences. Yesterday I noticed another piece of news, that a molted steel container had fallen in a steel factory in Liaoning, killing 32 people. I couldn’t help wonder what would happen when molten steel at over 1000 degrees met flesh and blood, and this gave me chills. I didn’t look at any of the details after that.

This morning’s news added that someone, perhaps the factory director, had been detained, but it didn’t seem like anyone had called to offer their condolences or punish those responsible, and certainly Bush nor Rice called to offer sympathy. It brought to mind the mining accidents that happened in America last year, or the year before that, which brought the attention of all of the US (apparently “only” several dozen “local” people were killed) and the horrible accidents that occurred one after the other in China. You’ll find that this isn’t a problem of the number of people dying. The shooting in America was due to the psychological shortcomings of one person, but China’s disasters are caused by the shortcomings of the system….

Another blogger wrote:

32 people were basically instantly melted by 1500 degree molten steel, becoming a large chunk of metal. How can the word “horrible” describe this?

“In yesterday’s [Chinese] news, no one brought up this accident, but gave the headlines to the Virginia campus on the other side of the world.”