Lingering Curse of a Factory's Deadly Dust

(Kunshan) – At Japanese metalworking factories, it's not unusual for potentially explosive metallic dust to be assiduously vacuumed from the air every two hours.

But removing metal flecks from the air was far less routine – in fact, officials say, negligently infrequent – before an explosion ripped through a Zhongrong Metal Products Co. auto wheel-polishing factory in Kunshan, a gritty factory town in eastern China's Jiangsu Province, on August 2, 2014.