An ammonia leak at a cold storage plant in Shanghai on 31 August has killed 15 workers [2] and injured 25 others, the Shanghai municipal government has confirmed.

Most of the victims suffered severe burns after loose pipe fittings at Shanghai Weng's Cold Storage Co. in Baoshan district burst open leading to a fatal liquid ammonia leak, investigators found.

The accident comes less than three months after a fire at a poultry processing plant [3] in the north-eastern province of Jilin on 3 June that killed 121 workers and injured 76 others. That fire was caused by an electrical short circuit which ignited combustible material and set off a series of explosions in the ammonia equipment and pipelines at the factory, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

In both cases, it was reported that workers had not been given any safety training in the proper handling of ammonia and were unaware of what to do in the event of an emergency. Moreover, in the case of the Jilin fire, only one exit in the factory was open at the time of the fire and 395 people were working inside. None of the workers had been given any fire safety training, and safety officials described conditions at the plant as “extremely chaotic.”

Following the Jilin fire, the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS) sent inspectors to factories across China and found that “problems were striking and everywhere...   Pipelines and wires were substandard, switches were not explosion-proof, and many valves had been rusted and could not be switched on or off.”

SAWS spokesman Huang Yi stated prophetically on 18 June that these problems “could cause serious accidents [4] if they are not properly addressed.”

There were 71,983 work-related deaths in China in 2012, down 4.7 percent from the previous year, according to official government figures [5]. The total number of industrial accidents in China last year was 336,988, a fall of 3.1 percent according to official figures.