Firefighter death toll may rise: first teams to attend Chinese port disaster ‘probably missed’ by official count
Three teams that attended Tianjin fire were employed by port rather than fire department, meaning they may not have been included in figures
The death toll of firefighters killed by the massive blasts at the port of Tianjin may be higher than that announced by authorities, as the first batch to arrive are unlikely to have been counted, mainland media have reported.
By Friday evening, a total of 56 people were confirmed to have died in the blasts, including 21 firefighters who were killed when trying to put out the fire, according to Tianjin authorities.
But the actual number of firefighter casualties could be higher, because the first three teams called to the site did not belong to Tianjin’s fire department, which is under the public security bureau, financial news outlet Caixin reported.
In China, most fire services are part of either the public security bureaus or armed police. But there are also firefighters hired directly by large enterprises.
Lei Jinde, the deputy propaganda chief of the fire department, told news website Thepaper.cn that “three professional fire service teams of the port office at the pier” were the first to arrive after the fire broke out at the warehouse.
“They are professional teams which belong to enterprise…We don’t really know their injuries and casualties clearly. They were the closest [to the site], therefore they could be there first,” Lei was quoted as saying.
The salaries of the Tianjin port firefighters were provided by the state-owned Tianjin Port Holdings, according to Caixin.
An unidentified source close to the Tianjin port’s fire service teams said many of the team members were still missing, including some team leaders.
Family members of the team leaders said on social media that they had not been able to contact them since Wednesday night.
There were 240 firefighters paid by the Tianjin Port Holdings, Caixin said. It was not clear how many of them were dispatched to the blast site.
