BEIJING — A fire at a poultry processing plant in northeastern China on Monday trapped workers inside a cluttered slaughterhouse with only a single open exit, killing at least 119 people in one of the country’s worst industrial disasters in years.
Survivors described panic as workers, mostly women, struggled through smoke and flames to reach doors that turned out to be locked or blocked.
One worker, 39-year-old Guo Yan, said the emergency exit at her workstation could not be opened and she was knocked to the ground in the crush of workers searching for a way to escape.
“I could only crawl desperately forward,” Guo was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency. “I worked alongside an old lady and a young girl, but I don’t know if they survived or not.”
The accident highlights the high human costs of China’s lax industrial safety standards, which continue to plague workplaces despite recent improvements in the country’s work safety record. It also comes amid growing international concern over factory safety across Asia following the collapse in April of a garment factory in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,100 people.
Besides the dead, 54 were injured in the blaze in Jilin province’s Mishazi township, which appeared to have been sparked by three early morning explosions, Xinhua said. The provincial fire department attributed the blasts to an ammonia leak. The chemical is kept pressurized as part of the cooling system in meat processing plants.
State broadcaster CCTV quoted workers as saying the fire broke out during a shift change when about 350 workers were at the plant, owned by Jilin Baoyuanfeng Poultry Co.
Some employees raised the alarm shortly after the shift began at 6 a.m., and then the lights went out, causing panic as workers scrambled to find an exit, 44-year-old Wang Fengya told Xinhua.
“When I finally ran out and looked back at the plant, I saw high flames,” she said.
The fire broke out in a factory building where chickens were being dismembered, and spread rapidly, with industrial boilers exploding, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported on its microblog. Only a side door to the building was open with the rest of the exits locked, the newspaper said.
It quoted an unidentified worker as saying the fire engulfed the building in three minutes, leaving too little time for many to flee.
By late in the day, Xinhua, the official news agency, said “people responsible” had been arrested over the disaster but did not identify them.
A provincial government media official, who refused to give his name, said he expected the death toll to rise as more bodies were recovered from the charred building.
The poultry plant is one of several in the area where chickens are slaughtered and then quickly cut up into pieces and shipped to market. The process takes place in near-freezing conditions and plants are usually built with large amounts of flammable foam insulation to maintain a constant temperature.
The New York Times contributed to this story.
