WAREHOUSE TIME BOMBS

BY llU SHA 〔劉莎〕

WAREHOUSE TIME BOMBS

BY llU SHA 〔劉莎〕

Taking steps to prevent storage catastrophes like the Tianjin blast

防范悲劇重演，探尋危險化學(xué)品的棲身之所

The warehouse explosions in Tianjin on August 12 claimed over 160 lives, one of the most serious chemical explosions in a decade. The warehouse, located in a port at the Tianjin Binhai New Area, stored large amounts of hazardous chemicals including 700 tons of sodium cyanide.

However, according to an environmental impact assessment report that was issued before the warehouse was first approved, the facility was cleared to store ten tons of sodium cyanide at most.

An investigation by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate found that Wang Jinwen, a senior official at the Ministry of Transport, helped the warehouse owner, Tianjin Ruihai International Logistics Co. Ltd—a company that had not been approved to store or transport hazardous chemicals—pass the safety evaluations and obtain approval.

The company didn’t just breach the regulations for operating dangerous chemicals, its warehouse—which was required to be at least 1,000 meters away from residential buildings, main traffic lines, and companies—was only 500 meters away from the nearest expressway and residential buildings. If the regulations were enforced, thousands of residents might not have been affected.

But beyond the media firestorm, few probed the environmental and social context for this disaster； chemical explosions are not rare in China. Two months after the blasts in Tianjin, on October 12, another blast hit an unlicensed warehouse that stored aqueous substances and alcohol—also in Tianjin. No injuries were reported.

Several days before that, on October 5, another blast occurred at a chemical plant in Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province, injuring seven； the fire began in a warehouse storing potassium chlorate.

Data collected by the Guangzhoubased Southern Metropolis Daily showed that, between 2010 and 2014, at least 2,237 people were killed in 326 accidents related to hazardous chemicals, including blasts, fires, and toxic chemical leakages. That’s over one and a half casualties a day over the last four years.

Explosions can happen at any stage: production, storage, transportation, and in use.

In the three most recent high-profilecases, all blasts occurred during the storage period and two of the warehouses were unlicensed and unqualified for storing hazardous chemicals. They not only claimed lives, but also left immeasurable impacts on the environment, with chemicals going in all directions, from the water to the air, during the explosions.

The most common hazardous chemicals tend to be flammable and volatile, so the storage materials and warehouse walls should be able to insulate heat and resist pressure. China has strict regulations on that, says Li Qinglu, associate professor of chemistry at Shenyang University of Chemical Technology.

But building to those specifications is more expensive, Li says. With higher costs, warehouses for hazardous chemicals charge eight to ten times more than normal warehouses.

So it is cheaper to choose unlicensed options, but also necessary—there simply aren’t enough licensed facilities.

Data provided by the China Association of Warehouses and Storage (CAWS) showed that there are around 5,500 hazardous chemical warehouse companies in China, but there are more than 290,000 companies producing hazardous chemicals.

Based on the number of licensed warehouses and expanding chemical plants in China, some insiders, quoted in state media, estimate that about 25 to 30 percent of hazardous chemicals are not stored in licensed warehouses.

At the explosion at the unlicensed store house in Tianjin, strong acids and lye as well as volatile alcohol were stored, and dealing with them requires both caution and training, says Zhang Chao, a PhD candidate in chemistry at Tianjin University.

But even in licensed warehouses, Chai Baoshen, secretary general of the Dangerous Goods Warehouses Branch of CAWS, says that 30 percent of the employees are migrant workers who do not have a degree in chemistry or related majors and only perform manual labor with very little training.

An underground warehouse crackdown by police in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, found one facility that had been storing 200 tons of hazardous chemicals. Staff used plastic tubes and steel buckets to package and sell the material. There were no fire extinguishers or alarm devices, and liquid chemicals were seen on walls and in rusty tin drums.

It can get worse； many unlicensed warehouses are simply empty houses with a locked door, Chai says.

The warehouses are unevenly distributed, with 70 percent of them concentrated in southeastern China’s coastal areas, the Hazardous Chemical Logistics Sub-association (HCLS) pointed out in its year-end report in 2014.

Considering the construction costs and difficulty of government approvals, establishing chemical warehouses is extremely difficult, says Liu Yuhang, general secretary of the HCLS.

Government officials know the potential danger to the environment and human life unlicensed warehouses can have, and many view such warehouses as ticking time bombs, an anonymous warehouse owner based in Tianjin port says.

“Without close connections with officials, it is not easy to locate a warehouse business in an ideal site,”he says.

After the Tianjin blasts in August, work safety administrations in Beijing and Shanghai held meetings and launched crackdowns against underground chemical storage operators. Guangzhou boasted that within a month, the city had found 26 companies illegally storing hazardous chemicals and hit six unlicensed warehouses storing hazardous chemicals.

While the risks of unlicensed warehouses are obvious, the problems with licensed storage are certainly not.

In the Tianjin accident in August, right after the first blast, firefighters ran into the fire with fire trucks, obviously having no idea that there were sodium-based chemicals in the area that released tremendous heat and became corrosive when they came into contact with water.

“The government only has certain data during the registration period or information retrieved during careful inspection,” says Wang Shi, deputy director of the Environment Health and Safety Academy at Nanjing University. Since there are always changes in what chemicals are being stored in warehouses, whenever an accident happens, it’s hard for the authorities to make emergency plans accordingly.

During inspection, officials check paperwork rather than the warehouse environment or the chemicals stored, Jiang Yongming, manager of the Shanghai branch of Nrssha Logistics, told the Southern Weekend.

Wei Hongyuan, professor of chemistry at Tianjin University and also a safety assessment expert, says that the problem is structural.

The assessment center Wei works at is responsible for safety evaluations at foreign companies like GSK, Pfizer, and the Dow Chemical Company, but no domestic company has ever come to Wei. “The assessments by government affiliates or recognized companies are more valuable,” he says.

ROADTOWINTER TEXT BY GlNGER HUANG 〔黃原竟〕

PHOTOGRAPHS BY WANG KUNlUN 〔王昆侖〕

The Olympics put it on the map, but there’s more to see now in Zhangjiakou and its nearby northern charms

2022年冬奧會讓默默無聞的張家口進(jìn)入了公眾視野，但人們并不真正了解它

Issue 6 /2015

Most travelers—even a lot of Beijingers who live only 180 kilometers away—can easily confuse Zhangjiakou with better-known tourist destinations with similar names, like Zhangjiajie or Zhangjiagang. The fact that it belongs to Hebei Province doesn’t help improve expectations, a province widely known as a world of steel factories, a gloomy concrete desert with legendary air pollution.

Zhangjiakou was only very recently lifted out of its comfortable obscurity in this Northern manufacturing hub, more specifically, on July, 31, 2015, when it was announced that Zhangjiakou would co-host the 2022 Winter Olympics with Beijing. Finally, Zhangjiakou was on the map. In fact, if you want to get away from the horrific din of Beijing for a weekend, then Zhangjiakou might be an ideal choice, at least for the time being. Once you are off the notorious traffic hellscape that is the Badaling Expressway (which might be the least enjoyable part of the whole journey, as you slowly inch your way forward, dwarfed among giant trucks) you are on a constant, slow climb that extends all the way northwest to Inner Mongolia. Zhangjiakou is the first city you encounter on this rise through Hebei Province, connecting the low lands of Beijing to Inner Mongolia like a staircase. It’s the opposite of the Hebei city stereotype so many assume, with its smooth, rolling hills and vast prairies.

Despite its recent fame, the city seems in the grips of an identity crisis. Zhangjiakou is comprised of six districts and 13 counties, covering an area of over 2,080 square kilometers, and due to this vastness, it’s a hard landscape to describe. Locals often divide Zhangjiakou up by referring to its plain area as “underthe bank”(壩下)and its plateau area “on the bank”(壩上).

Zhangjiakou’s government has already set off on a long journey to rebrand itself, largely by borrowing glamour from its already established reputation. It has tried a prairie music festival in its Zhangbei County(張北縣)as “China’s Woodstock” and the ski venues in Chongli County(崇禮縣)as “China’s Davos”. However, Zhangjiakou doesn’t need the borrowed platitudes of government slogans—it’s already got a brand. Xuanhua(宣化), our first stop after entering Zhangjiakou, took us back in time.

The Winter Olympics are all well and good, but Xuanhua has played more important roles in history. In 1420, the Yongle Emperor moved the Ming Dynasty’s (1368 –1644) capital from Nanjing to Beijing, and Xuanhua became a critical location for border defense against the Mongolians in the north. Although today it’s just a district, Xuanhua used to be a critical town managed directly from Beijing, where highly-ranked princes stationed their finest troops. With this mission came a formidable city wall with nine gates and dozens of fortresses—an important juncture on the Great Wall. As time passed, Xuanhua lost its previous utility and the Great Walls, fortresses, and courier stations were all left to crumble.

Today, Xuanhua’s central area doesn’t look much different from a picture taken 100 years ago. The bell tower and the drum tower are well-preserved, standing opposite each other with a distance of about a kilometer, connected by a market street where peddlers sell fruit, snacks, and antiques. The antique stalls hint at a Manchurian lifestyle—the most common pieces of merchandise are reddish copper pots and a kind of slender tin container for heating wine that was common in the in Late Qing (1616 –1911) and Republic period (1912 –1949). One can also find traces of Tibetan Buddhism in Xuanhua. Tibetan Buddhism was once the religion of Qing Dynasty royalty, but almost all of the monasteries were dismantled or relocated to Inner Mongolia after the founding of the PRC. Tibetan Buddhism has thoroughly lost its hold on this area, but here travelers can still find ancient books and scrolls explaining Tibetan Buddhist charms and sutras from a forgotten past.

A vintage stall at the foot of Xuanhua’s bell tower, with the merchandise telling the tale of the town’s nomad past

The sole surviving gate of Xuanhua’s old city wall, Changping gate

The town itself is already in a state of restlessness over the coming games. Xuanhua is being constructed, revamped, and polished with such fervor that locals aren’t quick to give directions. One man, when asked, said, “The roads have been reconstructed so much that we’re really not sure what road to take.”

A five minute drive from the bell tower, a new high-speed railway station is under construction. With the Chinese government’s typical efficiency under certain circumstances, the new high-speed railway will be built from Beijing to Xuanhua just for the convenience of the Winter Olympics. That old city wall that once protected the south from invading Mongols is also being revamped. Today, when you stroll through town, you can still see remnants of the old wall. It consisted of an inner mud-based core and an outer facade of bricks. The bricks were removed by residents in the 1950s to build houses under Mao Zedong’s call to dismantle ancient city walls. However, the naked mud wall has proved surprisingly resilient, still standing, tall and stubborn, after so many decades of weathering—natural and political. For the past few years, the Xuanhua government has been meaning to rebuild the wall and the gates, but reconstruction efforts have been sporadic. But, now that the Winter Olympics are on the horizon, the project has been put in full gear.

“Xuanhua is an ancient town, no matter how things change,” a young woman told us while we stood atop the bell tower and stared at the market below. “I’m a Xuanhua local, and this part of the town hasn’t changed...As long I can come over and look at these ancient buildings, I feel at peace and at home.”

We left Xuanhua with a trunk loaded with grapes, watermelons, and dates (the day and night temperature differences in Xuanhua make fruit particularly sweet) and headed for downtown Zhangjiakou.

At first glance, it is everything you might expect from a third-tier Chinese city: boring and ugly. That is, until we reached the old part of the city, Puzili(堡子里). A pu is a fortress close to the Great Wall, and Zhangjiakou, originally built in 1429, was but one of many pu managed under the Xuanhua government. It also contained a horse market where Mongolians

Terraces on the Zhangbei prairie

and the Han traded. By the Qing Dynasty, Zhangjiakou had become a prosperous export and import center where merchants of the Qing traded with Mongolians and Russians throughout the year. It was the biggest inland trade center in China, and even a gate, the Dajingmen(大境門), was opened on the Great Wall of the Zhangjiakou section—before that, the Great Wall didn’t have gates. Also, in 1905, China’s first railway, the Jing-Zhang Railway(京張鐵路), was built to connect Beijing and Zhangjiakou. Puzili was what remains of this commercial boom.

It is surprising to see such an expansive, well-preserved ancient town, with its temples and ancient schools, still functioning in such an lifeless, plain-looking city. Entering Puzili is like watching the world get colored in. You start in the city—blackand-white, quiet and cold—and then suddenly everything jumps to life in vivid color and lively conversation. The ancient school in Puzili is called Lun Cai Academy(掄才書院). On one side of the yard is a worship hall for Confucius. He smiles humbly under that embarrassing crown (obviously a new statue), while in the classroom opposite to him children read out from The Analects with long drawls. Old people seem to enjoy the outside of their alley apartments, playing cards and reading, willing to offer advice to the odd tourist. Indeed, tourists are scant in this part of the city, despite the charms of Puzili. For most, it’s simply a stop on their way to the prairies of the north.

We arrived in Zhangbei County at night. While most know little about Zhangjiakou, Zhangbei itself is wellknown to Chinese young people for its yearly music festival in August. Tourism is growing in Zhangbei, albeit in an unruly way, resulting in expensive food and lodging throughout the summer. Other than the music festival, the other draw to Zhangbei is the “Heavenly Highway of the Prairie”(草原天路).

This highway is a winding two lane road that connects Zhangbei and its neighboring county, Chongli. It can be found in Chinese travel blogs and is often referred to as “China’s Route 66”. It lives up to the hype. Most drivers say it takes 12 hours to drive the 120-kilometer-long highway. Travelers might be surprised to learn that it wasn’t built for this purpose； it was supposed to be a way of transporting windmills across the country.

Wind-power has exploded in the region over the past few years. In 2008, the Chinese State Council announced that the government would invest 4 trillion RMB in China’s infrastructure to boost the slowing economy. A few years ago, encouraged by the policy, stateowned enterprises and the private sector started to invest heavily in electricity plants, especially windmills. Thousands of giant white windmills mushroomed on the Zhangbei Prairie, and the so-called “Heavenly Highway”was built to ship these massive machines into its very depths. But, the stimulus soon died and the local plants didn’t have enough capacity for the output of all those windmills. Standing tall to this day, at least 30 percent of these windmills aren’t operating.

When travelers discovered the hidden beauty of this abandoned road to nowhere, Zhangbei was revived in a way no one expected. You never get bored driving this road—a path through woods, grasslands, terraces, rolling hills, and valleys, and in autumn the leaves turn gold and red. On most of the terraces along the way, flax seeds grow, and in harvest season farmers tie crops into rolls and stack them at even distances on the terraces, which from afar makes it look like strings of necklaces. The skyline is permanently outlined by windmills, which add a grotesque, industrial beauty. Here you can also see the various Great Walls—usually reduced to mere mud mounds andshattered rocks running along a mountain ridge. When you step on it, unlike other popular wall locations, you can feel thousands of years of history.

Chongli County, nestled among mountains with numerous ski venues, will host the 2022 Winter Olympics

The only thing missing from this vast prairie is cattle. You might see the odd sheep or horse, but herding is strictly forbidden here. In Inner Mongolia to the north of Zhangbei, grasslands are being rapidly devoured by desert, and the green gives way to the yellow sand of desertification. Beijing has suffered enough sand storms, and it cannot afford to have Zhangbei’s grasslands in danger.

The road is about to come to its end of service for the year； because of its high altitude, the road will be frozen after mid-October, the tourists will leave, and the hilly grasslands will again exclusively belong to the villagers who know how to get around during the five-month long winter. Before the frost and snow falls, if you can stick on the highway, it will take you to Chongli County.

Chongli is surrounded with forests that are ski venues in winter. It will also become the actual site of all ski events for the 2022 Winter Olympics. The name Chongli is very Confucius—literally meaning “respect for rituals”. However, on entering the town, you’ll be impressed by the way streets are built in a contrived European style. Welcome to “China’s Davos”, or“The Home of Skiing in China”, as it advertises itself.

In those hotels and restaurants that try their best to look fancy, waitresses and staff who are permanently tired and impatient seem to loath their customers. They’re still trying to foster that Olympics spirit as much as they can in an area that seems like an unlikely spot, at the moment unprepared for the coming onslaught. Like everywhere else in Zhangjiakou, Chongli is building new expressways and a new airport. The government of the county promises that, by 2022, it will take just one hour to get here from Beijing. The town, with its unfriendly restaurants and hotels, may not look welcoming or excited about its Olympics future, but with China’s incredible pace of transformation, there’s no telling what it will look like in a few years. Now may be the only time visitors have to see the area in all its strange, rural glory.