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According to media reports, a blast has hit a warehouse storing chemical compounds in the Chinese city of Jinjiang, north of Shanghai. Image Credit: AP

Beijing: A warehouse storing chemicals and fuel exploded and caught fire in the eastern Chinese city of Jingjiang on Friday, the local government and media reports said.

The blast recalled huge explosions caused by improper storage of chemicals in the northern city of Tianjin last August, when at least 165 people were killed and fears were raised of toxic contamination.

The latest accident was at the premises of a company called Jiangsu Deqiao Storage, which is authorised to keep hazardous chemicals, reports said.

The Jingjiang government said on its verified microblog that the fire was "under control" with no deaths or injuries. 

One photo posted online showed dark clouds of smoke with the fire still burning amid what appeared to be storage tanks.

The Jingjiang government statement said activity near the site had returned to "normal".



Industrial accidents are common in China where safety standards are often lax.

But the massive blast in Tianjin sparked widespread anger over a perceived lack of transparency by officials about its causes and environmental impact.

Jingjiang is a county-level city under the administration of Taizhou, in Jiangsu province.

It is located on the northern (left) bank of the Yangtze River, and is the southernmost county-level division of Taizhou City, bordering the prefecture-level cities of Nantong to the northeast, Suzhou to the southeast, Wuxi to the south, Changzhou to the southwest, and Zhenjiang to the west. 

The area of Jingjiang is 655.6 square kilometres and the population was 684,360 at the 2010 census.

The city is now part of Jiangyn-Zhangjiagang built-up area with 3,526,260 inhabitants, growing very fastly and that could nearly be part of Shanghai-Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou Megacity built-up area.