Two fatalities and nine more injured were the results of an explosion which ripped through Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics yesterday afternoon. The blast at “Nanhang”, known for its work on military and space programs, is the latest in Chinese labs.
At 15:54 yesterday, Nanjing’s emergency fire services received the alert to rush to the scene of the explosion, which was later confirmed by the University to have taken place at its School of Material Science and Technology.
Among the injured in the Jiangning Campus of Nanhang, six students were taken to hospital. The extent of their injures is unknown, reported The Paper. The identities of the two people who died have been withheld.
Social media quickly became awash yesterday afternoon with videos and photos of the unfolding scene. Some showed billowing clouds of smoke from one of the campus buildings, while other photographs depicted a man with burn marks on his skin and the emergency services clearing up in the aftermath.
The cause of the explosion is not yet known. An investigation is ongoing.
Chinese chemists will be hoping that if anything can come of the tragic incident, it might well be an addressing of their calls for improvements to lab safety at research institutions following previous incidents, reports the Global Times. Many chemists feel there has been a “systematic negligence of safety”.
Over the past few years, there have been numerous deaths from explosions in the laboratories of universities and research institutions in China.
Three students died in a blast at Beijing Jiaotong University’s Laboratory of Environmental Engineering in December, 2018, while 3 years earlier, a postdoctoral researcher died in a laboratory explosion at Tsinghua University.
Still in Beijing and as recently as March of this year, a blast in a laboratory in the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing killed a graduate student.
