Calls for potentially hazardous factories to be moved away from populated areas are mounting in France as rescuers continue the search for victims of one of the country's worst ever industrial catastrophes.
Officials yesterday said they believed five people were still missing in the ruins of the AZF chemical fertiliser plant which exploded on Friday in the southwestern city of Toulouse, killing 29 people and injuring more than 1,000 others, 30 of them seriously.
The blast, which was as strong as an earthquake measuring 3.4 on the Richter scale, levelled the plant and caused extensive damage to nearby businesses, homes and schools.
Authorities said an inquiry was under way to determine the cause.
Several reports said employees had made a mistake in mixing chemicals and others attributed the blast to a leak in a silo where ammonium nitrate was stocked.
AZF is the biggest fertiliser producer in France and is owned by the oil giant TotalFinaElf.
The plant, and others like it across France, has come under intense scrutiny since the blast with politicians and environmentalists criticising its location near an urban area and calling for tightened security at similar facilities.
"This incident must be used as an example in launching a real political debate to force these industrial sites to be moved away from cities," Green MEP Mr Daniel Cohn-Bendit, was quoted as saying in yesterday's daily Le Parisien.
"Environmentalists have long said that these chemical plants are too close to city centres . . . and clearly in this case the population was put at risk," he said.
The mayor of Toulouse, Mr Philippe Douste-Blazy, also called for such factories to be relocated from urban areas and urged the government to take action.
The Environment Minister, Mr Yves Cochet, said he would ask TotalFinaElf to rebuild the AZF plant elsewhere when he meets the company's president today. He also called on all similar factories to come up with proposals by the beginning of October on boosting security at such sites or relocating them away from residential areas.
The AZF plant is one of 1,250 high-risk sites in France which come under the EU's Seveso directive, an EU-wide law on safety standards on industrial installations.
It is named after an Italian town north of Milan, where nearly 200 people were contaminated in July 1976 by a leak of the carcinogenic toxic chemical dioxin at a local plant which manufactured pesticides and herbicides. Though the plant in Toulouse was built in 1924 in open fields, the city's suburbs later moved closer.
City officials have appealed to construction firms to help repair homes and public buildings damaged by the blast. Local authorities said 3,000 council flats had been damaged and 400 were uninhabitable. They said 450 people on Saturday had been given temporary lodging in local gymnasiums.