Amur gas chemical fire death toll rises to 15, 14 of them foreign workers

The Amur Gas Chemical Complex said on Thursday that 15 people are now confirmed dead after a fire that started during commissioning work on Tuesday. Fourteen of the dead are foreign nationals. The plant did not list every nationality in the later statement. An earlier count on Wednesday had named one Russian and six Chinese citizens among seven recovered bodies, with nine more Chinese workers still missing at that point.

Thirty-nine people remain in hospital, nine of them flown to Moscow. On Wednesday the operator said 152 people had needed medical help, 36 of them admitted. Video circulated on Tuesday showed workers running from the site at Chernigovka in Amur region, about 5,500 kilometres east of Moscow and close to the Chinese border.

The complex is a joint venture of Russia's Sibur and China's Sinopec. Published ownership figures put Sibur at 60 percent and Sinopec at 40 percent. The project is valued at about $10 billion. Design capacity is 2.3 million tonnes of polyethylene and 400,000 tonnes of polypropylene a year, which the companies describe as one of the largest polymer plants of its kind. Feedstock is meant to come from Gazprom's neighbouring Amur gas processing plant near Svobodny, which extracts ethane, propane and butane from pipeline gas bound for China.

AGCC said preliminary findings place the fire in an auxiliary process area of the pyrolysis unit. It said main production equipment was not damaged. Residual process gases were later burned under control. Construction and preparation for a planned start in early 2027 will continue, the company said. Russian reporting in May had put readiness at 100 percent, with first hydrocarbon feedstock already on site and the flare system in use.

The Investigative Committee opened a criminal case over possible breaches of safety rules at a hazardous production facility. That is the standard legal path after industrial fires in Russia. It does not yet assign blame. The Chinese consulate general in Khabarovsk sent a working group to the site after the first Chinese deaths were confirmed.

Large Far East construction sites have relied for years on contractor labour from China and Central Asia. The early statements from AGCC described the first confirmed fatality as a Chinese national employed by a contractor. That pattern matters for how compensation, visas and future staffing will be handled. The company said the family of the first named victim would receive support, including money. It has not published a full compensation schedule for the later deaths.

The timing is awkward for both shareholders. Sibur has spent the war years redirecting polymer sales and holding on to Chinese capital. Sinopec's stake is one of the more visible remaining Chinese industrial investments in Russia. A fire during final testing, with a majority of the dead from the Chinese workforce, will sit on the desk of both companies' boards and of officials in Beijing who track the safety of their citizens abroad.

Output targets will now depend on the investigation and on whether insurers and technical auditors accept the claim that core kit survived. Even a clean finding leaves a labour and morale problem on a site that still has to move from commissioning to commercial runs. The 2027 start date is the figure the operator is still using. The death toll is the figure that changed twice in 48 hours, and may change again if any of the hospitalised workers do not recover.