By Tamora Vidaillet
Beijing - A gas blow-out in south-west China turned an area of 25km² into a death zone, killing nearly 200 people in their sleep or outside their homes, a government official and state media said on Friday.
Rescue workers raced to stem the toxic fumes from the natural gas well which was being drilled in mountains 340km northeast of Chongqing city when Tuesday's blow-out occurred.
Xinhua said an operation to cut off the gas planned for 02h00 GMT on Friday had been postponed for 24 hours as rescuers searched for survivors. Dozens of fire trucks were standing by.
'Most of the bodies were found at home or by the roadside or in a valley' Local television showed flames spewing from the well, illuminating fog-shrouded mountains, after the poison gas was deliberately ignited.
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Newspapers showed pictures of children in hospital, their eyes sealed shut by the gas, and of stricken livestock littering the roads.
Tens of thousands of people, most of them farmers, have been evacuated from their villages where the temperature at night drops to freezing.
When the well erupted, it spewed a high concentration of natural gas and sulphurated hydrogen 30m into the air.
The fumes spread quickly to nearby areas and caused "mass casualties", the official Xinhua news agency quoted Wu Jianong, vice mayor of Chongqing, as saying, adding that poor communications and transport facilities hampered rescue efforts.
Among the dead were 39 children under the age of 10 At least 191 people were killed.
"The poisonous gas hovering in the air made an area of 25 square kilometres a death zone as many villagers were intoxicated by the fumes in their sleep," the China Daily newspaper said.
It said the accident was considered to be "the worst (of its kind) in China's history".
It was the second time in three years that disaster put a damper on China's Christmas, increasingly a day for revelry in big cities.
At least 309 people, many young people at a Christmas Day disco party, were killed when fire swept through a commercial centre in the central city of Luoyang in 2000.
Sulphurated hydrogen is a toxic gas that can poison or kill people who inhale 760 to 1 000 milligrams per cubic metre, Xinhua said. Only after the sulphurated hydrogen was set ablaze were rescue workers able to enter the area, vice mayor Wu said.
"Most of the bodies were found at home or by the roadside or in a valley," a county government official told Reuters by telephone.
"Chickens, horses and pigs were also killed."
Eighty rescue teams entered the hardest-hit villages early on Thursday to search for survivors and identify casualties. More than 41 000 people have been evacuated from within a radius of 5km of the gas field.
"Some 290 people, mostly children, were hospitalised and four of them were still in critical condition while some 3 000 local people were reported to have sulphurated hydrogen-caused symptoms like slight conjunctivitis and colds," the local health bureau told Xinhua.
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