Human error cause of pipe blasts

Nine people were detained on Monday for the deadly pipeline explosions in Qingdao, east China's Shandong province.

Seven people from Sinopec Corp and two from the Qingdao Economic and Technological Development Zone in Huangdao district, where the blasts occurred, were detained by police, Huangdao district government said on its official Weibo account on Monday.

Yang Dongliang, director of the State Administration of Work Safety and head of the team investigating the incident, said Monday that the accident had exposed the irrational layout of oil pipelines and urban drainage pipes and the negligence of duty in pipeline supervision as well as unprofessional handling of oil leaks prior to the blasts, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Yang made the remarks in Qingdao at a meeting of the team formed by the State Council to investigate the incident on Friday, which had left 55 people dead, nine missing and 145 hospitalized as of Monday evening.

The layout of the oil pipelines is worked out by local authorities and enterprises, so it will be difficult to apportion blame for the accident until the investigation has fully concluded, Wu Zongzhi, vice director of the Safety Science and Technology Research Center of the State Administration of Work Safety, told the Global Times.

Li Chunguang, president of Sinopec Corp, which owns the pipeline, apologized at the press conference. Li promised to conduct a thorough examination of the oil giant's more than 30,000 meters of oil and gas pipelines in the city.

Yang said the investigation will focus on the direct cause of the pipeline leak and explosion and reason for the slow evacuation of local residents. The resulting report will be made public. Staff from the Supreme People's Procuratorate has been invited to join the investigation, he said.

Yang also urged local governments across the country to conduct safety examinations on their pipeline network to ensure worker and public safety. The investigation team Monday released a phone number for the public to report concerns to.

The public were incensed that local media failed to report the fatal accident in local newspapers until Sunday, two days after the blasts.

"Local media in Qingdao failed to fulfill their responsibility to make public the emergency," said He Jing, associate professor at China Youth University for Political Sciences.

The explosion occurred around 10:30 am Friday while workers were repairing the ruptured section of the Dongying-Huangdao oil pipeline. Crude oil began leaking around 3 am on Friday at Zhaitangdao Lu in Qingdao Economic and Technological Development Zone in Huangdao district. However, the evacuation of local residents did not commence until after the explosions.

The leaked oil polluted an area of around 1,000 square meters on Zhaitangdao Lu and flowed into the city's rainwater pipeline system, China Central Television reported Monday. It also affected local fisheries. Some fishermen have found that young fish had been killed near the Huangdao district, China News Service reported.

The blasts were a stark reminder of a previous tragedy in the same area of the city in 1989, in which five oil tanks exploded successively, killing 19 people and injuring another 78.

Caijing Magazine attributed the scale of the 1989 tragedy to the poor infrastructure quality, the overcrowded layout of flammable facilities and inadequate emergency responses.