Edited for brevity.
Clouds of poison gas from a burst well left a "death zone" of villages strewn with bodies in China’s southwest, with at least 191 people killed and 41,000 forced to flee, news reports said Friday. Gas spewed from the well in the Chongqing region as technicians prepared an emergency effort to seal it with cement. They were supposed to make the attempt Friday but put it off until Saturday to let rescue officials focus on rushing food and water to the evacuees. More than 290 people were hospitalized, many of them children, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Newspaper photos showed children with red faces and their eyes inflamed from chemical burns. The gas well burst Tuesday in the remote mountain town of Gaoqiao, releasing a cloud of natural gas and hydrogen sulfide, according to state media. Xinhua said the disaster occurred when a drilling accident broke open a gas well. "The poisonous gas hovering in the air made an area of 25 square kilometers (10 square miles) a death zone, as many villagers were intoxicated by the fumes in their sleep," the China Daily newspaper said. Hardest-hit was the village of Xiaoyang, adjacent to the gas field. A reporter for the Shanghai Morning Post newspaper who visited Thursday wrote of seeing at least six bodies lying beside homes and in fields. The bodies of a 12-year-old boy and his mother were found on a road, the newspaper said. Dead chickens, pigs, owls and dogs were strewn around the village, many with white foam in their nostrils. A merchant in Xiaoyang was credited with saving 400 people, using his truck to make 20 trips carrying them away from the gas, the newspaper Chongqing Economic Times reported. |