A mid-level manager with a steel company in Liaoning province has been detained over a breach of safety regulations blamed for last week's molten steel spill, which killed 32 workers, a company source said yesterday.
An employee with the Qinghe Special Steel Corp in Tieling said the director of one of the company's workshops where the spill occurred was in police custody in connection with the incident, which also left six workers injured, two critically.
The state-owned steel processing company is designed to produce 210,000 tonnes of steel products a year and employs 870 workers.
Citing a State Administration of Work Safety report, the China News Service said initial investigations had exposed serious safety breaches at the molten steel workshop.
Investigators found the ceiling-mounted workshop crane used to move ladles of molten metal was not up to the standards required under work safety provisions. Managers had flouted work safety precautions by holding a shift-rotation meeting too close to the pouring site.
The spill happened on Wednesday at 7.45am, when a 30-tonne-capacity ladle pouring steel ingots sheared from an iron railing, spilling white-hot, molten steel to the workshop floor two to three metres below. It spread to a team of workers in the shift-rotation meeting, killing 32 and injuring six.