A third victim of the deadly BASF plant explosion has been retrieved by divers in a Ludwigshafen river harbor. Authorities are working to identify the body, while the cause of the blast remains unknown.
Divers uncovered a "male corpse" at the bottom of the BASF Rhine river harbor where the blast took place, Rhineland-Palatinate police reported on Twitter.
Authorities will conduct an autopsy to definitively determine whether the body is that of a sailor who was reported missing following Monday's explosion, a police spokeswoman said.
"Unfortunately, we believe our fears have become a sad reality and we have a third casualty to lament," said BASF board member Margret Suckale said in a statement.
The BASF explosion on Monday killed two members of BASF's fire service and injured over 20 people, six of them seriously.
The prosecutors' office in the nearby town of Frankenthal launched an investigation on suspicion of negligent homicide, negligent bodily harm and negligence resulting in an explosion. They also ordered autopsy reports.
The BASF firefighters were caught up in Monday's blaze after responding to a small fire near the docks where ships unload highly flammable liquids and liquefied gases into a system of pipes.
Firefighters battled the blaze for 10 hours before it was put out. During the incident, BASF was forced to shut down 20 facilities, including two steam crackers, which produce basic hydrocarbon chemicals used to manufacture a wide range of plastics and other chemicals.
Authorities gave the all-clear to nearby residents on Tuesday evening after asking them to remain indoors with their windows closed. The city of Ludwigshafen reported that some complained of respiratory irritations following the blast.
Monday's incident came just two years after Ludwigshafen was shaken by a devastating gas explosion near the BASF chemical plant. That blast killed one excavation worker and injured 20 other people, severely damaging nearby houses.
Chemical industry giant BASF turns 150
Foundation, fusion, destruction, re-foundation - BASF's corporate history, like that of the nation from which it emerged, has had periods of genius and periods of deep darkness. Its mission now: Engineering the future.
Image: BASF SE
A global corporate player
There's no corporation in the chemical industry that has bigger revenues or a larger market cap than BASF. Sales in 2014 amounted to a hefty 74.3 billion euros ($79.9 billion). The company has 113,000 employees in more than 80 countries. The corporate HQ is in western Germany at Ludwigshafen am Rhein (pictured). BASF has more than 390 production sites around the world.
Image: picture alliance/Fotoagentur Kunz
A business built on byproducts
BASF was founded on April 6, 1865, by Friedrich Engelhorn, under the name of Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik (later BASF). Engelhorn had already been running a factory for several years that supplied the city of Mannheim with gas for its street lamps. A byproduct was coal tar. Engelhorn decided to found BASF to produce tar-based and aniline dyes for the textile industry.
Image: BASF SE
Materials for making fertilizer and gunpowder
Since the turn of the 20th century, thanks to R&D by German chemists Fritz Haber und Carl Bosch, it has been possible to produce ammonia on an industrial scale. That's a key ingredient for both fertilizer and explosives. During the first world war, BASF produced explosives, gunpowder, and poison gas for the German military.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Philipp Schulze
Chemical industry consolidation
The European economy pace of recovery after the first world war was rather slow. The German chemical industry's main firms had already collaborated loosely since 1916, in support of the German war effort. In 1925, BASF fused with five other firms, including Hoechst and Bayer, to form I.G. Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft (I.G. Farben). Pictured: I.G. Farben's then-HQ in Frankfurt (Main).
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Complicity in making weapons of mass destruction
I.G. Farben collaborated with the Nazi regime. The company made extensive use of forced labor, including concentration camp prisoners. Pictured: The I.G. Farben facility at Auschwitz-Monowitz, where Zyklon B poison gas was produced. The gas was originally meant to serve as an insecticide, but the Nazis ended up using it in the death camps to murder millions of human beings.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
BASF in ruins
Allied troops occupied I.G. Farben's Ludwighafen factory in March 1945. It had already been largely destroyed by aerial bombing. In the same year, the four occupying powers confiscated the company's entire capital stock. In the Soviet occupation zone, the company's factories were dismantled and shipped East, or nationalized. In November 1945, the Allied control council dissolved I.G. Farben.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
Resurrection
On January 30, 1952, eleven companies were created out of the ruined legacy of I.G. Farben, among them several future major-league players: Agfa, Bayer AG, Hoechst AG, and BASF. Initially, BASF focused mostly on making plastics. Over the decades that followed, BASF broadened its product range and built more and more production facilities around the world. It became a global company.
Image: dapd
An all-round chemical industry player
BASF's product range is huge: Paints and varnishes, styrofoam, insulation materials, medicines, light stabilizers, vehicle battery materials, adhesives and more. The company invests heavily in research - for example in organic solar cells (pictured). The company's 2014 research budget was around 1.8 billion euros.
Image: BASF SE
Chemicals sales
A large fraction of BASF's sales consist of chemicals and production materials for other industries, including construction, pharmaceutical, textile, and automobile industries. BASF materials used in the renovation of London's Underground (pictured), for example, include tunnel boring machines, robotic machines for rock-wall support construction, spray concrete and fire protection coatings.
Image: BASF SE
Surprising sidelines
Public awareness of BASF's wide range of businesses is limited. Few people know, for example, that BASF is not only the world's biggest chemical industry company, but also one of Germany's biggest wine sellers. The company sold about 900,000 bottles in 2013 alone. The cellars of the wine sales subsidiary, more than 100 years old, feature more than 2,000 different wines.
