Fire Kills 28 at Chinese Shoe Factory
At least 28 people were killed when a fire tore through a shoe factory in Jinjiang, in China’s south-eastern Fujian province, one of the country’s deadliest industrial blazes in years. The fire broke out around midday in a store of flammable materials and spread fast through adhesives and raw stock, with rescuers hampered by goods piled in the stairwells. Of the 239 people inside, 213 were evacuated. Company managers have been detained and the firm’s bank accounts frozen as an investigation begins.
The death toll points to the failings that recur in China’s industrial accidents: flammable materials stored in workplaces, blocked or overloaded escape routes, and safety rules honoured on paper more than in practice. That the fire started in a materials store and raced through shoe adhesives, while stairwells clogged with stock trapped workers, is a near-textbook account of how a survivable blaze becomes a mass-casualty one. Beijing’s swift move to detain the company’s managers and freeze its accounts follows a familiar pattern after such disasters, in which visible punishment substitutes for the harder work of enforcement across millions of small manufacturers. Jinjiang is a hub of China’s footwear industry, much of it in exactly the kind of densely packed, thin-margin plants where inspections are sporadic. Watch the official cause findings, whether prosecutions follow, and whether this prompts another national safety campaign of the sort that has followed previous factory fires without ending them.