A worker was killed after accidentally falling into a steelmaking furnace on Tuesday morning in a steel company in Daye, central China's Hubei province.

According to the local police, the accident happened at 12:40 a.m. The dead worker is surnamed Huang.

Huang, 53, wearing a pair of anti-high temperature gloves, was about to throw raw materials into the furnace. However gloves accidentally stuck together with the materials. The huge inertia made Huang fall into the furnace.

"It was just 10 seconds," Wang, Huang's colleague, recalled the scene of accident. Huang's head fell into the furnace first. Wang tried to catch Huang, however, he only grabbed one of his shoes.

The temperature inside the steel furnace was about 1,700 degrees Celsius. It takes more than 10 hours for the furnace to cool down.

According to the initial conclusion drawn by the local police, it was a production safety accident.