Beijing: At least 17 people were injured after an explosion shook a residential area in the province of northern Shanxi of China, creating clouds of smoke and breaking glass in neighboring buildings, reported on Wednesday April 30.
The explosion occurred around 5:17 GMT (1:17 p.m., Singapore time) in the city of Taiyuan de Shanxi, said the CCTV of the state diffuser, without giving the cause of the incident.
Images traveling on Chinese social media Weibo, not verified by Reuters, seemed to show several vehicles engulfed in flames outside a building, with dense smoke spilled from cars and residential windows.
In total, 210 firefighters and 43 fire trucks were deployed on the scene, the video surveillance said. The Chinese Emergency Management Ministry has sent a working group to guide rescue operations and ordered ground research per floor to check the number of people trapped in the building.
The explosion one day came after a restaurant fire In the northeast Liaoning province of China, killed 22 people. President Xi Jinping described the incident as “a deep lesson that gives thought” and urged local officials to do everything they could to prevent major security accidents.
Liaoning authorities said on Wednesday that the exact cause of the fire was under investigation, but they had excluded an explosion of gas or criminal fire, video surveillance reported.
The initial analysis suggests that the victims trapped inside the restaurant are probably dead after breathing a large amount of toxic gas while the fire was quickly spread through very flammable furniture and decorative materials, video surveillance said.
The latest incidents have followed a series of similar accidents across China in recent years. Earlier in April, 20 people were killed in a fire that broke out in an apartment for the elderly in a nursing home in the northern province of Hebei.
