DEHUI: Relatives of workers killed as fire engulfed a chicken processing plant in rural northeast China blocked traffic and scuffled with police on Tuesday, demanding answers to one of China’s worst industrial disasters in recent years.
At least 120 people died, and more than 70 were injured.
A handful of men and woman knelt in the middle of the road in Dehui in Jilin province to stop cars, while a crowd of more than 100 people gathered around them. Police dispersed the protesters after about an hour.
Zhao Zhenchun, who lost both his wife and his sister in the fire, said human error was to blame for the death toll.
“I don’t think safety was being managed properly. This should never happen again. They paid the price with their blood. So many of these big disasters in China are caused by lax supervision,” he said.
The world’s second-largest economy has a poor record on workplace safety. Fire exits in factories are often locked to prevent workers taking time off or stealing things, or blocked entirely.
“The rationale behind the locked doors boils down to efficiency. With the doors locked, workers cannot wander about freely, and therefore concentrate on their work,” the official Xinhua news agency said.
Safety regulations are also easily skirted by bribing corrupt officials, and in any case China has relatively few fire safety inspectors.
“Tragically, most of the inspections usually come after a disaster like this,” said Geoffrey Crothall, a China labour expert with Hong Kong-based advocacy group China Labour Bulletin.
“There’s very little proactive or routine inspections of factories to make sure everybody’s up to code and that’s largely because there are too many factories and too few inspectors.” (Reuters)