gornyhuy

How can a blast which demolished 1,850 buildings only kill 54 people?

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axelcat

I dont know about that

gornyhuy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Apr23.html

Blast Sends 'Sea of Fire' Through North Korean City
Dozens Reported Killed After Train Collision
By Edward Cody and Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign service
Friday, April 23, 2004; 11:42 AM


DANDONG, China, April 23 -- Cars and trucks sped madly by, she recalled, packed with bleeding, moaning passengers on their way to hospitals, clinics, relatives' homes -- anywhere but the nearby North Korean railway station where a tremendous blast had just sent a "sea of fire" rolling across an entire neighborhood.

"People were in every posture," the woman related shortly after arriving Friday afternoon in Dandong, on the Chinese bank of the Yalu River borderline. "Some were lying down. Some were standing. Some were crying and screaming. They all looked scared."

The blast, which occurred midday Thursday at Ryongchon about 12 miles east of here, carved a large circle of death and destruction in the city of 130,000, according to official and humanitarian sources. John Sparrow, a regional spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said it killed at least 54 people, injured 1,249, demolished 1,850 buildings and damaged about 6,000 more. Anne O'Mahony, regional director of the aid group Concern, told reporters by telephone from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, that the government informed her organization about 150 people had been killed and more than 1,000 injured.

The traveler interviewed here said she was told by a friend, who visited the blast site Thursday afternoon to look for missing family members, that many buildings, including a school that was in session, were smashed by the concussion or burned by the flames within a radius of more than a mile. She said she heard the explosion -- "one big sound, like a thunderclap" -- as she was eating lunch around noon in a restaurant about six miles from the Ryongchon railway station where the disaster occurred.

A satellite photo posted on the British Broadcasting Corp. Web site showed smoke billowing from the site more than 18 hours after the explosion went off.

The woman, who lives here and had just accompanied a visiting aunt back home, related what she had experienced on condition she not be identified. "I have relatives in North Korea," she said. "I cannot tell you my name. If they knew I told you about this, I would never get a chance in my entire life to go back again."

Liang Shenzhu, 26, a Korean who moved here and started a trading business 10 years ago, said he called a classmate who lives in Ryongchon shortly after hearing of the devastation. The classmate, a 25-year-old woman who lives about 500 yards from the railway station, was slashed on her right arm by flying shards of glass from the shattered hahahahahahas of her home, he said.

The classmate told him during their brief call that she saw two giant craters near the railway station, apparently ground zero of the blast, Liang said. He refused to identify his friend, saying he feared she would be harmed by North Korean authorities.

Doctors at Dandong's five hospitals were ordered to prepare to treat wounded from the explosion and a Chinese customs official said a team of Chinese specialists had crossed into North Korea to assess the situation. But by Friday evening, 36 hours after the blast, no North Korean patients had arrived in Dandong, according to a doctor at the city's Railway Hospital who identified himself only as Sun.

Oil tankers and cargo trucks, along with at least two buses, passed across the gray, steel-girder China-Korea Friendship Bridge, which spans the 700-yard-wide Yalu River here at the northern head of the Yellow Sea. But no ambulances were seen making the crossing.

Reports circulating here among relatives of people living around Ryongchon said North Korean authorities were preventing the wounded from seeking treatment in China, despite China's readiness to help. But like most of the information emanating from North Korea's closed society and authoritarian government, those reports were uncertain.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement Friday that the North Korean government had requested international assistance and that an assessment team would visit Ryongchon on Saturday. "A formal request for international assistance in response to the disaster was received by the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Pyongyang this afternoon from the [North Korean] Government," the statement said.

South Korean officials said their offers to transport some of the badly wounded to South Korea for treatment were turned down by North Korean officials, who said the injured should remain in North Korea. North Korea's own government and news media did not report on the explosion; most of what is known about it has come from South Korean and other foreign sources, and their accounts varied.

Jeong Se Hyun, South Korea's Unification Minister, said the explosion was set off by the collision of two trains loaded with fuel. Sparrow, the Red Cross spokesman, said he was told the rail cars were carrying explosives, perhaps for mining. In a dispatch from Pyongyang, the official New China News Agency said ammonium nitrate -- a substance used in fertilizers that can be explosive -- had been leaking from one of the trains. O'Mahony said her group was told freight cars carrying explosives were being attached to a train when they touched dangling electric wires, setting off the blast.

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