WASHINGTON, Feb 8: Six people were killed in a huge blast ripped through a sugar refinery in the US state of Georgia, injuring dozens, authorities said on Friday.

More than 100 people were inside a building in which the sugar is packed into bags at the Imperial Sugar Co. near Savannah when the blast took place at around 7:30 pm on Thursday, Savannah Fire Department Captain Matthew Stanley said.

The cause of blast remained unknown, but refinery managers said it could have been caused by sugar powder, Stanley said.

“We now confirmed six dead. ... We’re still looking for other survivors because there are other people unaccounted for that might be in that building,” Georgia fire official John Oxendine told CNN television.

“Also we’re very concerned about the people at the Augusta burn unit and what may be their condition,” he added.

Stanley said that with sugar “when that is aerosolised, it can get ionically charged and light off with a bit of static electricity. It’s rare but it can happen,” he said.

The blast affected three to four large warehouse-type structures in the middle of the refinery’s huge industrial complex, Stanley said.

The explosion could be heard throughout the community and shook homes several kilometres away across the river in neighbouring South Carolina, he said.

The area impacted “looks like a small war zone,” he said.

And the injuries were horrific, witnesses said.

“Some of them (the victims) had no skin at all. And some of them it was on their faces. And some had skin just dripping off of them,” Joyce Baker, who helped victims at the scene, told CNN.

In such cases “there’s really not much we can do initially because we did not have the equipment ... but we try to keep them warm and keep them stable and talk to them and then get them in the ambulance units and get them to the hospital as soon as possible,” she added.—AFP