At around 7.18pm on Friday evening, an explosion caused a partial shutdown of a facility operated by electronics giant Foxconn in Chengdu, China.
Initial investigations into the event, which claimed the lives of at least three, suggest that the cause of the blast was poor ventilation, leading to high concentrations of combustible dust.
Foxconn, one of the world’s largest electronics manufacturers and major supplier to firms like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sony, Motorola and Nokia, halted production after the blast in order to launch the investigations, saying:
“All operations at the affected workshop remain suspended and production at all other workshops that carry out similar processing functions have also been halted pending the results of the investigation.
All other production operations in our facilities in China continue operating normally.”
Hong-Kong based labour rights group Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour said they had reported aluminium dust problems when they reviewed the working conditions at Foxconn.
