BEIJING (AP) — At least 31 people were killed and seven injured when cooking gas exploded at a restaurant in Yinchuan in northwestern China. It was the latest in China’s long history of deadly industrial accidents, which occur regularly despite government pledges to clamp down on lax standards, poor oversight and corruption frequently blamed for the collapse of buildings, mine cave-ins, explosions and other disasters. Here is a look at some of the worst in recent years.
2023:
-- Open-pit mine collapses in February in China’s northern Inner Mongolia region, burying dozens under rubble and killing 53. The company running the mine was fined the previous year for multiple safety violations.
-- A massive explosion at a chemical plant in northeastern China killed at least 13 people in January. Some 35 other people were injured in the blast in the outskirts of the city of Panjin east of the capital, Beijing.
2022:
— A fire caused by welding sparks that ignited cotton cloth stored at a trading company in the central province of Henan in November killed 38 people. In the same province, 54 people were killed when a building collapsed on the outskirts of the capital in April.
— A restaurant fire in the northeastern city of Changchun blamed on a gas leak killed 17 people in September.
— In July, a partial building collapse in Tianjin triggered a gas explosion that left four people dead and 13 injured. The same northern port city was the site of one of China’s worst industrial accidents in recent years, when 173 people, most of them firefighters and police officers, died in an explosion at a chemical warehouse in 2015. Local officials were accused of taking bribes to ignore safety violations.
2021:
— Four people were killed when a six-story workers’ dormitory partially collapsed in November in the southern province of Jiangxi.
— At least three people were killed and 30 injured in an October gas explosion at a hotel in Shenyang in northern China.
— Fourteen workers constructing a tunnel for a new expressway in southern China were killed in July when it collapsed on them.
— A toxic chemical leaked in June at a plant in the southwestern city of Guiyang, killing eight and injuring three.
— In the central province of Hubei, a severely corroded gas line ruptured and exploded in June, killing 26 and injuring 138 others at a bazaar.
— Nine workers tasked with destroying expired mining explosives in Hebei province were killed in April when the materials exploded.
— Ten workers were killed in a gold mine in eastern China in January when explosives blew up in an accident blamed on improper storage and use of the materials.
2020:
— Twenty-nine people celebrating a villager’s 80th birthday in northern China were killed in August when the two-story restaurant they were in collapsed.
— A bus plunged into a sinkhole on a city street in northwestern China in January, killing at least nine and injuring 17.
2019:
— Nine people were killed when a wastewater tank in a dyeing and printing mill collapsed in eastern China in December.
— A highway tunnel under construction in southwestern China collapsed in November, killing 12 workers.
— An explosion at a chemical plant in southern China in October killed at least four people and injured six.
— Nine people were killed in October in a restaurant gas explosion in the eastern province of Jiangsu, the same province where a massive chemical blast in March left nearly 80 people dead.
— A truck carrying nearly three times the allowed weight for a bridge caused the span to collapse in eastern Jiangsu province in October, killing three people in cars below.
— A fire of unknown origin at a factory in eastern China killed 19 people in September.
— An explosion at a gas plant in central China in July killed 15 and injured 15 others.
— Five workers were killed in June when a subway tunnel under construction collapsed in the northeastern city of Qingdao.
— Ten people died in downtown Shanghai in May when a building they were renovating collapsed. A 2010 fire in an apartment building being renovated, blamed on sparks from a welder’s torch, killed 58 people in the same city.
— Eleven workers were killed in April when an elevator cable snapped at a construction site in northern China.
— In March, 78 people were killed in a blast at a chemical plant in the eastern city of Yancheng that had numerous safety violations.
