Indonesia factory blast injures 54
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Workers look on as the factory burns.
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SURABAYA, Indonesia -- A large explosion ripped through a chemical factory near Indonesia's second city of Surabaya, injuring at least 50 people, five of them seriously.
Police said Monday's blast and subsequent fire in the East Java industrial town of Gresik appeared to be an accident.
"It was a thundering sound like an erupting volcano," a police officer near the scene told Reuters.
He said 54 people, most of them workers at the factory owned by PT Petro Widada which makes chemicals used in plastics, were injured in the fire that followed the blast.
Five men with serious burns had to be taken to the main Surabaya hospital.
A senior doctor at Surabaya's Soetomo hospital told Reuters that none of those being treated showed signs of chemical irritation.
"The bodies of four victims are 70 percent burnt while the other one has 30 percent. Two of them are in surgery right now," he said.
A spokesman for PT Petrokimia Gresik said authorities were still struggling to determine the cause of the incident.
Gresik, about 675 kilometers (420 miles) east of Jakarta, is a densely populated town and home to dozens of factories.
