One person was killed and 76 others were injured by fireworks
over the past day in Beijing, the capital city's temporary
fireworks office said on Thursday.
The deceased victim, surnamed Zhang, was badly hurt while
igniting a homemade device at 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Lunar New
Year's eve, in his courtyard. He died in the early hours of
Thursday, the first day of the Year of the Rat, despite emergency
medical treatment.
An investigation showed that Zhang had been drinking
beforehand.
The fireworks office, which was launched on Thursday morning to
supervise fireworks displays during the holiday, said that
fireworks had triggered 90 fires since Wednesday night.
However, the number of fires was down 21 percent from last year,
and injuries were down 42 percent, according to the police.
"From 1 a.m. to 8 a.m., our hospital received 51 patients whose
eyes were injured when setting off fireworks. Twenty of those
patients had eye surgeries, and two children lost eyes," said Lu
Hai, director of the Eye Trauma Department of Tongren hospital on
Thursday.
Beijing cordoned off 102 streets in 106 residential compounds
for fireworks displays.
Some 3,500 street cleaners and 105 trucks cleaned up 54 tons of
debris over a 10-hour period, according to the Beijing Environment
Sanitation Engineering Group on Thursday morning.
The city lifted a 12-year ban on firecrackers in 2006. Since
then, two deaths, 1,510 injuries and more than 2,400 fires caused
by mishandled firecrackers have been reported.
Deafening and sometimes fatal, firecrackers are nonetheless an
essential element of China's most important festival of Lunar New
Year, which officially began on Thursday.
Beijing tightened control over illegal firecracker production
this year by launching a crackdown on substandard firecracker
workshops throughout the city. Checkpoints were set up at the
entrances of every major highway into Beijing to prevent the inflow
of illegal firecrackers. Also, Beijing police destroyed 3,000 boxes
of substandard firecrackers, valued at more than 1.2 million yuan
(167,000 U.S. dollars), ahead of the festival.
China accounts for about 75 percent of world firecracker
production.
More than 410,000 police officers, volunteers and security
guards and 5,700 vehicles were patrolling the city overnight on
Wednesday to ensure a safe traditional Spring Festival for local
residents.
"We are extremely busy on the Lunar New Year's eve. I must
answer up to several hundred calls to deal with emergency
situations in just an hour," said Zhang Chao, 26, who works for the
"110" police hot line.
Zhang has stayed in Beijing for the past two years during the
Spring Festival instead of returning to his northeast hometown of
Heilongjiang. "Hard work is rewarding if it helps to rescue
someone," Zhang said.
(Xinhua News Agency February 8, 2008)