Industrial Accident in China Kills 12

Nanjing, ChinaAn industrial accident in eastern China has left 12 people dead and another 300 injured.

A major explosion caused by a broken gas pipeline recently rocked a plastics factory in Nanjing, the capital of the Jiangsu province, according to the Los Angeles Times. Chinese state news reports indicate that the blast happened when factory workers dug into a propylene pipeline.

Virtually every structure within 100 yards of the explosion collapsed, however many of them were old single-story homes that had been marked for demolition.

The Los Angeles Times reports that this incident was just the latest in a series of troubling industrial accidents in China. Earlier this month an explosion in a northeastern port city caused a massive oil spill. In addition, an acid leak at a gold and copper mine recently killed about 2,000 tons of fish.

"These accidents are not unpredictable but, rather, are the inevitable consequence of inadequate transparency and weak enforcement" of safety standards, Alex Wang, senior attorney in the Beijing office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told the news source.