Gas Suspected in Fatal Blasts That Jolted a City in Taiwan

TAIPEI, Taiwan - A series of explosions ripped through the city of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan on Thursday night, killing 22 people and wounding more than 270, the authorities said. The dead included at least four firefighters.

Kaohsiung's mayor, Chen Chu, called the blasts a 'suspected petrochemical material explosion,' but local officials said it was too early to pinpoint a specific cause. At a news conference early Friday officials said that a leak of ethylene, propene or butane may have caused the explosions after flowing into sewage lines, the government's Central News Agency reported.

The news agency said that the disaster was 'not connected to terrorism.' The explosions began around midnight Thursday, affecting more than a square mile of the city's downtown. Residents reported a large-scale gas leak about 9 p.m. in the city's Cianjhen District, Taiwan's National Fire Agency said.

The force of the blasts overturned cars and caused roads to crumple and collapse in some places. News footage showed buildings hundreds of yards from each other engulfed in flames, with bright orange fireballs leaping up from grates in city streets.

Video from a car dashboard that a resident posted online showed an explosion fill the ground floor of a building. The driver turned to avoid the fire, only to encounter flames gushing from the middle of the street a block away.

Security camera footage showed the blast roaring down city streets, followed by billowing clouds of smoke and flying debris. Some roads completely collapsed, leaving emergency vehicles crushed and passengers pinned under piles of concrete.

'At the moment of the explosion my whole body flew up in the air,' a police officer, Chen You-ping, who suffered injuries to his head and face, told the Apple Daily newspaper. 'When I fell back down the ground had collapsed by the height of a person.'

Soldiers were dispatched to begin sifting through rubble and help rescuers search for survivors.

By 6 a.m. Friday the fires were mostly extinguished, but firefighters were still battling one large blaze. Officials closed off a section Kaohsiung's downtown and warned of the risk of further explosions. The government ordered the gas company to cut supply in the area, leaving more than 20,000 homes without gas.

More than 1,000 people were displaced from their homes and spent the night in eight emergency shelters.

Taiwan's Ministry of Justice said it was dispatching up to 100 investigators to look into the cause.

Kaohsiung, with about 2.8 million residents, is Taiwan's second-largest city. It is near a major port on the island's southwest corner.

The explosions were the second major disaster to hit Taiwan in just over a week. A turbo prop passenger airplane crashed in bad weather on the outlying island of Penghu on July 23, killing 48 people.