CHINA: Nine million citizens in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin were still without running water yesterday as a 80km-long slick of toxic waste passed slowly along the Songhua river towards the city.
The discharge occurred after an explosion at a petrochemical plant nearly two weeks ago.
The blast at Jilin city released benzene, a toxic substance used to make petrol, into the Songhua from which Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, gets its drinking water.
China's environmental watch- dog SEPA said the river had 100 times the normal levels of benzene and the Heilongjiang government told residents to stay away from the river to avoid exposure to airborne contamination.
The incident is the latest environmental catastrophe in China, where the downside of strong economic growth is terrible pollution. At a conference in Jiangxi province this week, experts said 70 per cent of China's rivers were contaminated.
The spill also highlights the precarious state of China's water supply system, where the country is trying to provide water to 1.3 billion people with increasingly scarce supplies. Premier Wen Jiabao told a state council meeting: "Our country's environmental situation remains grim."
In Harbin, people dug 100 new wells after the water system was shut down, though work was complicated by temperatures of minus 12 degrees.
Harbin, famous in China for its winter festival, closed schools and brought in bottled water from neighbouring areas.
Local officials warned residents to watch out for symptoms of benzene poisoning, which in heavy doses can cause anaemia and other blood disorders, as well as kidney and liver damage.
Heilongjiang governor Zhang Zuoji ordered hospitals to prepare for possible cases of poisoning. He also promised to drink the first glass of water from city taps once the pollution passed.
A provincial government spokesman said the pollution slick had passed the capital's reservoir early yesterday and would pass the city tomorrow.
There were few signs of panic in Harbin, where most people had hoarded enough bottled water for the next few days. "This is bad, but I'm sure it will be fine and will all be over by Saturday. We've enough water for the time being anyway," said a resident.
Most citizens continued to work and shops and restaurants stayed open. Many luxury hotels in the city still had hot water. But the train station was still packed with people trying to get out of Harbin, eyewitnesses said.
A local environmental protection group recently issued a report documenting widespread chemical pollution along the Songhua and warned that many factories were secretly dumping waste water and chemicals into the river.
The explosion happened at a chemicals plant in neighbouring Jilin province on November 13th, just a few hundred metres from the Songhua. Five people were killed.
Jilin water officials released a surge of water from a dam to dilute the toxins, the Xinhua news agency reported. Jiao Zhengzhong, vice-governor of Jilin province, issued a rare public apology to the people of Harbin.
Russia's environmental protection agency has said it is worried the pollution could affect drinking water supplies in its Khabarovsk region, which the Songhua enters several hundred kilometres downstream from Harbin.