Chinese rescue teams fan out across gas 'death zone'

Under a sky darkened by fires lit to curb the spread of the silent killer, 1,500 police, firemen and soldiers split into 80 teams to cover an area of 80 square kilometers (32 square miles) to retrieve bodies and look for survivors.

Officials and residents of Kai county, the site of the gas field some 340 kilometers (210 miles) northeast of the large city of Chongqing, feared the casualty figures would rise further once they started reporting back.

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"The rescue workers have been sent to the villages to check on this," said Wang Ruxiang, an official at Gaoqiao township, near the epi-center of the disaster.

Officials and media described horrible scenes of sudden death in the hours after Tuesday's blow-out sent a 30-meter (100-foot) geyser of concentrated toxic gases into the air, causing people to drop where they stood.

"Some bodies were found at their homes, some outside," said a Kai county official.

Only two of the bodies were workers employed at the gas field. The rest were local residents, 39 of them children below the age of 10, the China News Service reported.

"Many young people have gone out to work in faraway cities, leaving behind the elderly and kids at home who could not act swiftly to seek safety," said Pan Benqing, an official with a hospital in Zhonghe Town.

The frank reporting of the death toll Friday contrasted with the day before, when state-run media had initially said only eight had died in an industrial accident that is now called the worst in Chinese history.

Rescue teams and technicians had been scheduled Friday to pump some 260 cubic metres of concrete into the well to contain the escaping sulfurated hydrogen.

But the plan was put off for 24 hours, the Xinhua news agency and officials said.

Dozens of fire trucks and emergency equipment remained on standby around the gas field, operated by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).

"CNPC pays a high degree of attention to the rescue work after the blow-out," the company said in a statement.

Some 290 people, mostly children, were hospitalized and four of them were still in critical condition Friday, while some 3,000 people were reported to have sulfurated hydrogen symptoms like conjunctivitis and colds, Xinhua said.