18 killed in blasts at Chinese fireworks factories

The deaths came as China’s fireworks industry - which has been plagued by fatal accidents - steps up production for lunar new year festivities. Chinese set off millions of firecrackers on the holiday, which this year begins 12 February.

Nine people were killed on Saturday when a boiler holding raw materials exploded at a fireworks factory in the southern city of Yulin, the Xinhua News Agency said. Yulin is about 250 miles west of Hong Kong in the Guangxi region, one of China’s poorest areas.

Pieces of the boiler were found up to 350 feet away from the factory, which had 2,100 employees, Xinhua said. It added that 25 people had been injured.

In the second disaster, a series of seven or eight explosions on Sunday ripped apart a rural factory in the Jiangxi province, killing nine people and injuring 60, news reports said. The area is about 800 miles south of Beijing.

Photographs in the Beijing Evening News showed firefighters picking through the smoking rubble of the factory, which was knocked flat.

Jiangxi is a centre for fireworks production, an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people, many in poor areas. Much of the work is done by hand in small workshops or at home in poor villages.

An explosion in March in another part of Jiangxi destroyed a schoolhouse and killed at least 42 people, most of them children.

Parents claimed their children were being forced to make fireworks at school. The government denied that, but the prime minister, Zhu Rongji, apologised on national television for poor public safety.

Last June, 40 people were killed by an explosion at a fireworks factory in Guangdong, which borders Jiangxi to the south. Five factory managers and a local official were imprisoned on charges of violating safety rules.