Our team was on location to capture drone footage of a chemical plant that caught fire in the Jixi County area of Xuancheng, a prefecture-level city in east China’s Anhui Province.

On February 21, at around 11:00 local time, Qingfeng Tianying Biochemical Co, a chemical plant in Anhui province that produces insecticides, caught fire. The blaze caused a thick plume of black smoke to engulf the surrounding area.

By 13:00, local firefighters confirmed that the fire had been extinguished and no casualties were caused by the incident. The cause of the fire is still under investigation and a statement from the local Ecological Environment Bureau suggested that, whilst the fire started at an insecticide production facility, locals would need to wait for the results of the investigation before they could ascertain whether the smoke produced by the blaze was poisonous.

This video shows how our team in the newsroom validated the drone footage we received in the aftermath of the incident.