Behind the suffocation of 8 people in the refrigerated truck: an older female worker who squeezed the car to do odd jobs during the slack season

The Paper

2024-06-19 09:14Published on the official account of Shanghai The Paper

Near midnight, a cordon was set up at a gas station near the Pingdingshan Station of the Lannan Expressway.

The petrol station is located 500 meters from the highway entrance, next to the provincial road, with food factories and car 4S shops nearby, and several villages further along. On the night of June 15, 2024, people near the gas station and villagers heard that the gas station had "had an accident" and rushed to the gas station at midnight.

According to the report of the joint investigation team of the "6.15" incident, a light van refrigerated truck in Shanye County, Pingding, Henan Province was illegally occupied, and 8 people in the compartment were suffocated and unconscious.

Local villagers and family members confirmed that on the day of the incident, the eight people killed were all temporary female workers in a beef factory, aged about forty or fifty. The gas station is the distribution center for their daily commute, and there are cars here to transport them to the factory about 12 kilometers away from the gas station.

On June 18, there were personnel in and out of the beef factory.

Around the Dragon Boat Festival, the wheat around Yexian County had just been harvested, and yellow wheat stubble was left in the fields. Villagers in nearby villages are mainly based on farming, and their work is arranged according to the season. During the slack season, some female workers take advantage of their leisure time to do odd jobs in the surrounding factories to earn money.

Family members of the victims and other female workers at the beef factory said this was not the first time the women workers had ridden in refrigerated trucks. The difference is that this time the compartment of the refrigerated truck is full of goods.

Commute by refrigerated truck

"How long does it take to get off work?" At 8:59 p.m. on June 15, Yang Gu, a villager in Hongdong Village, Yang Town, Hongzhuang Town, Pingdingshan City, sent a message to his wife.

Yang Gu asked his wife on WeChat when she would get off work. Photo courtesy of the interviewee

Ten days ago, his wife, who is in her 50s, was introduced by fellow villagers to work as a temporary worker in a beef factory. At around 6:50 a.m., my wife went out and rode an electric car to a gas station near her home, and then took a car with other female workers for about 20 minutes to a factory more than ten kilometers away. The same is true for the return trip, where the workers take the bus back to the gas station together and then go home separately.

Yang Gu wasn't sure what time his wife would be home. If you don't work overtime, the factory will leave work at 6 p.m.; If you work overtime, you get home at 10 p.m.

At 10:47 p.m. that night, before Yang Gu could wait for his wife's reply, he sent another message to ask. After 11 a.m., he called his wife twice but did not answer. It wasn't until 11:29 a.m. that the third phone rang out, and an unfamiliar voice told him, "Something happened to someone." ”

At about 10 o'clock in the evening on June 15, a light refrigerated van with a license plate number of Yu DJ103F illegally rode to the territory of Yang Town, Hongzhuang, Yexian County (500 meters west of the exit of Pingdingshan Station of Lannan Expressway), when the driver found that 8 people in the carriage were suffocated and unconscious, and immediately dialed 120 and carried out emergency rescue.

Zhang Mei, a villager who sat in the cockpit of the refrigerated truck that night, was one of the first to discover what had happened. Like Yang Gu's wife, she worked odd jobs in a beef factory and had used to get off work in a refrigerated truck, but she had never been in a car because of motion sickness. She said that after work on the evening of the 15th, due to the large amount of goods in the car, another villager sat in the cockpit with her, and there were a total of 10 female workers in the car except for the driver.

She remembered that when she opened the car door that night, she found that all eight people in the carriage had fainted, so she hurriedly let two or three people to the ground, and then moved the rest of the people to the ground with the help of the surrounding villagers who rushed to the ground after hearing the news.

That night, Li Guangyi, a villager from a nearby village, received a call from a relative: "Many people fainted at the gas station, and some people were not breathing. Li Guangyi was a young man with first aid training and hurried to the scene after receiving the call. Arriving at the gas station at about 10 o'clock at night, Li Guangyi saw eight people lying on the ground in a corner, as well as three or four medical personnel and several nearby villagers at the scene.

Li Guangyi immediately checked the situation and carried out first aid, but did not have time to confirm whether the eight people were still breathing. The lights at the scene were dim, and he turned on his mobile phone flashlight to check and found that all eight of them had similar symptoms: purple lips and red vomit at the corners of their mouths. For more than an hour, Li Guangyi performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on three of them, but there was no sign of waking up.

That night, Li Guangyi noticed that nearly 20 medical personnel had arrived to carry out rescue one after another.

Many people who worked around the gas station also saw that on the night of the 15th, the gas station set up a cordon, and ambulances came and went. An employee of a nearby company said that the female worker who was in the driver's seat of the refrigerated truck on the same shift that night had asked the company's night shift security guard for help.

Near midnight, when Yang Gu arrived at the gas station, the eight people lying on the ground were gone. He didn't know which hospital his wife was sent to, so he asked several hospitals in the county seat. It wasn't until around 1 a.m. that he saw his wife's body at the Yexian People's Hospital.

According to the report of the joint investigation team of the "6.15" incident, as of 3 o'clock on the 16th, eight people in the refrigerated car were unfortunately killed.

A hub for commuting to and from work

Zhang Mei is about 50 years old and already has some gray hair. After the incident, she went to the police station to take notes all night, and did not return home until five or six o'clock in the morning. She was frightened, and a few days later, she was still depressed and resting at home.

The eight people who died in the accident, like Zhang Mei, were temporary workers working in a beef factory called Haorui Meat Food Store in Pingdingshan High-tech Zone, all villagers from villages near the gas station. Zhang Mei said that the female workers in the factory do not always commute to work in refrigerated trucks, but only take occasional rides.

The store with the registered address of Haorui Meat Food Store.

In June last year, Wu Xia, a villager from Caoli Village, worked in the beef factory for a day. She also remembers that it wasn't refrigerated trucks that picked up workers. She said that last year, a female worker in the same village had a seven-seater van, so she picked up six or seven people from the village and went directly to the beef factory, and then pulled her back to the village after work, and the factory would pay the woman to drive. But she heard that around the Spring Festival in 2024, the female workers who drove would stop working, and there would be no cars to pick up and drop off the village.

Later, the gas station at the exit of Pingdingshan Station of Lannan Expressway became a traffic distribution point for the surrounding female workers to commute to work, and the female workers set off from here in the morning and returned in the evening. The gas station is a midpoint landmark in the surrounding villages. As you can see on the map, the gas station is within 3 kilometers walking distance from Hongdong Village, Caoli Village, and Baizhuang Village under the jurisdiction of Hongzhuang Yang Town, and only about 1.3 kilometers away from the nearest Caoli Village.

The reporter verified with the surrounding villagers and family members that there were villagers in Hongzhuang Yang Town, Hongdong Village, Caoli Village, and Baizhuang Village who were killed in the refrigerated truck accident.

Wang Yan, from the same village as Wu Xia, was killed in the accident. They live close to each other, they are about the same age, they are all around 50 years old, so they know each other well, and they have also bought vegetables together during the Dragon Boat Festival. Sometimes Wu Xia would ask Wang Yan to buy some beef from the factory, and the preferential price was forty or fifty yuan per catty.

Wang Yan also introduced Wu Xia to work for a day in the beef factory of "Haorui Meat Food Store". Wu Xia said that the work in the beef factory is not easy, the workshop is a bungalow, and the rooms responsible for different flow processes are separated by glass, including cutting beef, sterilizing, boiling beef, packaging beef, etc. On the day she went, there were about a dozen people working, and the women who often went were very skilled in each process. She was in charge of cutting beef, and after about 11 hours a day, her hand holding the knife was sore.

In Caoli Village, most of the villagers who remained in the village were middle-aged people in their forties and fifties and some elderly people, who made a living from farming. In June, local farmers had just finished harvesting their wheat, and their fields were covered with yellow stubble. After the wheat harvest, the quick-handed farmers have planted peanuts. The last time Wu Xia saw Wang Yan was on the evening of two days before the incident, when she had dinner and walked to Wang Yan's field to see that she was still watering peanuts there.

This year, Henan has little rain and drought, and the peanuts planted in June have been watered twice. Wu Xia and Wang Yan stood and spoke. "I said I'd finish pouring it, and I'd rest for a few days. She said, 'yes.'" Wu Xia recalled.

But Wang Yan did not rest for a few days as she said, but quickly went to work in the beef factory for a day, and then got into a refrigerated truck.

The question of lack of oxygen in the carriage

The "Haorui Meat Food Store" beef factory where the female workers who died in the incident worked is located in Pingdingshan High-tech Zone. According to Tianyancha's public information, Haorui Meat Food Store was established in March 2023, operated by Zhu Yonghao, mainly engaged in wholesale, and is a small and micro enterprise. Zhu Yonghao also operates another company, called Pingdingshan Haozhirui Food Co., Ltd., with a registered capital of 600,000 yuan, which was established in February 2020.

The bungalow factory with the brand of Pingdingshan Haozhirui Food Co., Ltd. was hung at the door, and a cordon was pulled at the door.

On June 18, The Paper reporter called the company's public phone number several times, but no one answered. The two companies have the same registered address, both are located at No. 19, Yulan Street, High-tech Zone, Pingdingshan City, about 12 kilometers away from the gas station where the female workers get on and off the bus, and about ten minutes away by car along the S242 provincial highway.

On the afternoon of the same day, the reporter went to the address and saw that a store signboard read "Haorui Brand Beef Canteen", and the store window had been closed by a white grid board. Ten meters away from the store, there is a row of houses suspected to be used as factories, and the signboard at the door reads "Pingdingshan Haozhirui Food Co., Ltd."

The main entrance of the store and factory at this address is closed, and the entrance at the other end is cordoned. But there are still machines running in the factory, making noises, and two people coming in and out to move goods. There are many white foam boxes placed near the cordon.

On the night of the incident, when he participated in the first aid at the scene, Li Guangyi took a look at the carriage, which was also full of white foam boxes, and the mouth of the box was sealed with duct tape. Zhang Mei told him at the scene that eight people had fainted in the carriage, which contained goods and dry ice in foam boxes.

"There are two pieces of dry ice in a box, each weighing a pound." Li Guangyi said, "There is nothing (packed) outside the dry ice, and it is directly placed in the foam box and covered with a foam lid." ”

After the incident, the emergency management bureau in many places reminded that the refrigerated truck refers to a closed van truck used to maintain the temperature of frozen or fresh goods.

Some villagers believe that a large amount of dry ice was stored in the carriage on the day of the incident, or that the carbon dioxide generated by improper storage caused people to suffocate to death. As of press time, this statement has not been officially confirmed.

According to the transportation safety requirements of the group standard "T/CCGA 50003-2019 Technical Regulations for Dry Ice Packaging and Transportation Safety" of the China Industrial Gases Industry Association, small vehicles and other manned vehicles should not be used to transport dry ice without adequate ventilation to prevent the personnel on the vehicle from being overexposed to carbon dioxide atmosphere; And when the person and the dry ice are in the same confined space, the vehicle should be ventilated. In addition, dry ice packaging should have holes or automatic pressure relief functions, and should not use fully enclosed bottles, pots, barrels and other packaging forms to prevent bursting; The outer packaging should be correctly pasted and marked with precautions for the use of dry ice.

According to the investigation team, at present, the truck driver and the relevant responsible persons have been controlled, and the aftermath work has been carried out, and the specific cause is still under investigation.

A woman doing odd jobs

The "Haorui Meat Food Store" beef factory is not well-known in the local area, and it is not a large-scale enterprise, but it has good traffic on the short video platform. The short video platform has an account called Haorui Meat Products Flagship Store, and the authentication body is Pingdingshan Haozhirui Food Co., Ltd. As of June 18, the account had 237,000 followers, mostly about a male anchor promoting beef products sold in an online store.

The reporter noticed that from the middle of 2023, this company account began to broadcast live frequently, sometimes 3 live broadcasts in a day, ranging from half an hour to 3 hours per show. Since June 2024, the account has been broadcast every day, and the last live broadcast was at 6:01 p.m. on the day of the refrigerated truck accident on June 15.

Wang Yan is a familiar hand in this factory. Wu Xia said that among the three people killed in Caoli Village, Wang Yan and another female worker have been working in the factory for several years.

She thinks that Wang Yan is a person who can endure hardships. The work in the beef factory is hard and the wages are not high. From 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., 100 yuan a day, and if you work overtime for more than one hour, add another 20 yuan. Calculated on a daily basis and issued monthly.

Rather than staying in the village to find work, Wu Xia prefers to work in other places. She has been in food factories and medical factories in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Every year after the Spring Festival, Wu Xia set off to work in the factories in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and went home to harvest wheat around the Dragon Boat Festival, stayed for a few months, planted peanuts, and planted new wheat in October, Wu Xia ran out again, working everywhere. "There is a lot of money, food and shelter, more than 200 yuan a day." She said.

But Wu Xia understands that finding odd jobs in surrounding factories is a last resort for some people. She said that Wang Yan's only son, who is in his twenties, has an intellectual disability, cannot cook, and cannot take care of himself. The husband of another female worker from the same village who died in the accident also suffered from illness, and the child was only 13 years old. A relative of a female worker who died in Yang Township, Hongzhuang, said that her adult daughter and husband were working outside the home, while she herself stayed behind to take care of her minor son.

But at least this is more than helping farmers farm to make money, which is why women workers are willing to go into beef factories. "It's sixty or seventy dollars a day in the field." Wu Xia knows that it is not easy for middle-aged women to find a job in the local area, "Who wants it at this age?" ”

On June 18, Wu Xia heard that Wang Yan's body had been taken back to the village last night. On this day, the Wang family gathered many relatives and sat at the door with a small bench. They don't want to talk about it more.

Wu Xia wanted to go to see Wang Yan, but hesitated not to go. "I'm afraid of feeling uncomfortable." Speaking of the deceased neighbor, her eyes turned red and she went to wash her face.

(Yang Gu, Wu Xia, Zhang Mei, Li Guangyi, Wang Yan are pseudonyms)

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