Five days after two powerful explosions and a chemical fire leveled a port facility in Tianjin, China, on Aug. 12, the fate of the first responders is still unknown.
According to reports, they were a mostly young and relatively untrained group, which arrived at the scene responding to a fire at around 10:50 p.m. The first of the two enormous explosions that rocked the area—shattering windows in apartment buildings a mile away—was recorded at around 11:30 p.m.
The sequence of events, and the fact that there has been no definitive word about the vast majority of the frontline firefighters who were first to respond, indicates that they may have been caught in the explosions.
According to family members and reports, there were between 30 and 40 firefighters in Team Four, and 25 in Team Five, the first two groups that responded to the disaster. Only five or six of them (from Team Four) have been accounted for. The official death toll for firefighters is a total of 31.
Family members have cried foul about a possible coverup of these deaths, given that Chinese authorities have not made any formal, clear statements about the fate of this group of firefighters. Moreover, a recent, detailed article about their experiences reported by the state-funded online news media outlet The Paper, was recently deleted from the Internet.
