Tianjin Warehouse Operator Flouted Safety Rules Before Explosions
By TE-PING CHEN
Aug. 19, 2015 4:01 a.m. ET
Wall Street Journal
BEIJING—The company at the heart of the deadly blasts that engulfed a chemical warehouse in northeast China last week sought to dodge safety restrictions, state media said Wednesday.
It also operated for months without proper licensing, something that the company’s key shareholders said was standard practice, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
According to Xinhua, Ruihai International Logistics Co. was founded in 2012 with backing from two men who enjoyed a wealth of political connections that helped their business get off the ground. One of them, Dong Shexuan, was the son of the former head of the Tianjin port’s public security bureau. The other, Yu Xuewei, was formerly employed at Sinochem Tianjin, a company dealing in logistics and chemicals, whose former clients he drew on while at Ruihai, according to Xinhua.
All that was upended when twin blasts erupted last week, sending up huge plumes of flames and killing 114. The disaster has riveted the nation and spurred angry calls for justice. Some 10 officials associated with the company have had their movements restricted, according to state media.
Xinhua quoted Mr. Dong as saying that Ruihai, when first seeking authorization to store dangerous goods, was initially refused by one safety-evaluation company that said the proposed distance of the company’s warehouse was too close to residential buildings. Xinhua said its interviews were conducted in a Tianjin detention center.
National standards dictate that large quantities of dangerous chemicals should be stored at least 1,000 meters (0.6 mile) from public buildings and infrastructure. However, Xinhua said that the warehouse was located only some 560 meters away from a nearby residential complex.
Workers are sterilized after sifting through the core of last week’s chemical-storage blast area in Tianjin. ENLARGE
Workers are sterilized after sifting through the core of last week’s chemical-storage blast area in Tianjin. PHOTO: XINHUA/ZUMA PRESS
“The first company said it was too close to residential buildings and violated the regulations, so we wouldn’t pass,” Mr. Dong told Xinhua. Mr. Dong said Mr. Yu subsequently said he would find a new company to do the evaluation.
“In the end, it was dealt with,” Mr. Dong said. Mr. Yu disputed the account to Xinhua, saying that he wasn’t managing safety-evaluation proceedings and wasn’t clear on what had happened.
The company was eventually licensed to deal with dangerous chemicals on a trial basis in April 2014. That license had lapsed in October last year, with the company only receiving another one in June, meaning that for eight months, it was operating without the necessary approval to handle dangerous chemicals, the agency said.
Xinhua said the company that finally approved Ruihai’s security evaluation was Tianjin Zhongbin Haishen. Two people listed with Tianjin regulators as in charge at the company hung up their cellphones when contacted.
The company had previously been cited by the State Administration of Work Safety earlier this year, which said that some of its personnel lacked needed training and licenses.
Ruihai couldn’t be reached to comment. It wasn’t possible to contact Messrs. Dong and Yu. Zhu Liming, deputy head of the planning and land management bureau at Binhai New Area, the area of the blast site, couldn’t be reached. The Tianjin work-safety bureau declined to comment.
In his conversation with Xinhua, Mr. Yu suggested the officials’ casual attitude toward licensing was accounted for by the fact that other businesses operated the same way. “At the time, when the trial license expired, we didn’t apply for the extension. On the one hand, we felt the formal license could be approved quickly, on the other, other companies also haven’t gotten extensions. Some have gone more than a six months without doing so and no one cares, so we didn’t take it seriously,” he said.
The report also cast doubt on other aspects of the company’s application for its license, including its environmental-impact assessment report.
While the company’s report suggested that 130 questionnaires had been issued to local residents soliciting their opinion on the proposed warehouse—with nearly all of them being returned with no objections to the project—more recently, Xinhua said, some residents said they had never seen any such questionnaire. They hadn’t been aware of the existence of a nearby chemical warehouse, it said, until the fatal blast erupted.
—Olivia Geng and Fanfan Wang contributed to this article
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Tianjin Warehouse Operator Flouted Safety Rules Before Explosions