benzene, nitrobenzene, detergents and aniline, which is used in making rubber
Officials in Harbin, China, started digging wells after the city's drinking water was declared unsafe due to a chemical explosion last week that caused toxins to spill into the Songhua River.
Teams of workers began digging 40-meter wells away from the river for replacement water, the government of the northeast Chinese city said in a statement on its Web site today.
The river is beginning to freeze over, the Harbin Daily newspaper reported today, making it more difficult to get rid of the nitrobenzene, which spilled into the watercourse after a Nov. 13 explosion at a PetroChina Co. plant in Jilin, upstream from Harbin.
China, which has grown 9.5 percent a year for the past decade, has struggled to rein in industrial accidents that have killed thousands in mines and chemical plants. PetroChina's former chairman, Ma Fucai, quit in May last year to take responsibility for a December 2003 blast that killed 243 people and poisoned more than 10,000.
The river water should be clean enough to process for drinking by Nov. 27 as toxins dissipate in the current, Zhang Lijun, vice minister of China's State Environmental Protection Agency, said yesterday.
Donations of mineral water are pouring into the city from across the country, officials said in the statement. More than 9,000 cases of mineral water arrived from Guangdong in the south of the country.
Blaming Petrochina
PetroChina, the nation's biggest oil company and parent of Jilin Petrochemical Co., which runs the plant, today apologized for the accident. The company has formed teams to help Harbin drill the wells, the company said. PetroChina will be held responsible for the spill, Zhang told reporters in Beijing yesterday.
The Jilin plant produces benzene, used to make chemical products such as detergents and aniline, which is used in making rubber. Water from the Songhua River was found to contain as much as 100 times the maximum allowable level of chemicals near the site of the blast, 220 miles (350 kilometers) upstream, the environment agency said on its Web site yesterday.
Hydropower plants along the river have been ordered to increase water flow to further reduce the concentration of pollutants, the city said today.
China informed Russia of the spill three days ago, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said yesterday. The Songhua River flows across the border into Russia.
source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aOu7F.oswWjU# 25nov2005
Millions of residents in China's Harbin city endured their third full day without running water due to a toxic chemical spill, as the government worked frantically to clean up the pollution.
Harbin's taps remained turned off as an 80-kilometer (50-mile) slick of the carcinogen benzene and nitrobenzene that was well above national safety levels flowed slowly through the city along the partially frozen Songhua river.
While the government tried to reassure Harbin's 3.8 million urban residents that water supplies would resume quickly, many people were still evacuating the city and engineers were continuing to sink dozens of wells.
Millions of bottles of water were also being trucked in to replenish supermarket and shop shelves that had been stripped bare at the beginning of the crisis.
The slick reached Harbin, the industrial capital of Heilongjiang province in China's far northeast on Thursday morning after taking 11 days to flow 380 kilometers down the Songhua from the spill site in neighbouring Jilin province.
The spill occurred after an explosion at the PetroChina chemical factory on November 13 in Jilin city, although the government refused to admit until Wednesday — 10 days later — that the river had been polluted.
Harbin government officials said the contaminated water was due to exit the city's water catchment areas by early Saturday, with taps to be turned on again on Sunday.
"The mayor has requested the concerned authorities to allow the public water system to resume services on November 27," Heilongjiang public water works spokeswoman Liu Yuzhu told AFP on Friday.
Xinhua news agency said the polluted water in Harbin remained 30 times above national safety levels on Friday morning.
Although the initial panic of water hoarding that preceded the water stoppage appeared to have passed, many residents were still unprepared to put their trust in a government that had initially covered up the chemical spill.
A saleswoman at the Harbin Taifu ticket centre told AFP all train seats out of the city remained booked out on Friday, a scenario usually only associated with national holidays and festivals.
"There are no tickets available for the next week... it is to do with the water pollution," the saleswoman, who did not want to be named, said.
A salesman at Harbin airport said sales remained unusually brisk on Friday, with only a few tickets left for Beijing.
The China Daily quoted Harbin businessman Liu Yunlong as saying he was sending his two sons out of the city to avoid any chance of contamination.
"I can't afford to let anything happen to my children," Liu said.
The psychological strain of the water stoppage and contamination fears were also beginning to take a toll with the Harbin authorities setting up counselling hotlines on Thursday for anxious residents, Xinhua said.
And although authorities said taps would be turned on again this weekend, the local government said on its website that 55 wells had been sunk over the past three days and there were plans for many more.
Nevertheless, local authorities were relentlessly upbeat about the city's ability to brush aside the crisis.
"The provincial governor has pledged to drink the first glass of water after the mains are turned on," Liu, at the public water works, said.
"We want to assure everyone that the water is going to be safe to drink. All our efforts are aimed at providing clean and safe drinking water."
HARBIN, China — China on Friday sent investigators to probe the handling of a two-week-old chemical spill that forced a major city to shut off the water supply to 3.8 million people as state media gave uncharacteristically critical coverage to the environmental crisis.
An 50-mile (80-kilometer) stretch of cancer-causing benzene and nitrobenzene was slowly winding its way down the Songhua River through Harbin, in China's frigid northeast. Authorities estimate that 100 tons of pollutants were released into the river following a Nov. 13 chemical plant explosion upstream.
Officials kept news of the spill secret for days and initially said they were shutting off water merely for maintenance.
A work team of investigators, including disciplinary officials, left Friday for Harbin, the official Xinhua news agency said.
"Punishments of irresponsible acts are on the way," Xinhua said in a report apparently aimed at the growing concerns domestically and abroad that officials haven't done enough to address the crisis.
Xinhua said the incident had "stunned the whole nation." "It has been horrible for more than three million people of Harbin to be bereft of water for four days," it said.
The missteps in Harbin are further straining the credibility of a government grappling with widening outbreaks of bird flu and facing rising public anger over endemic local corruption.
State-run media raised unusually tough questions this week about the government's handling of the spill.
"If information is not given in a timely, accurate and transparent manner, it will leave room for rumors to spread," said a column printed in the China Youth Daily newspaper that gave a play-by-play account of the local government's misinformation and confusion.
Other papers quoted experts as questioning the government's handling of the spill, asking how the pollutants reached the river and complaining about the lack of backup water resources and plans for handling such emergencies.
One paper called on Beijing to learn a lesson from its outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which emerged in late 2002. The government was initially criticized for withholding information about the pneumonia-like disease, drawing international criticism.
"The government should tell the public the truth," the Beijing News said in an editorial in its Thursday edition. "During SARS, the publication of truthful information turned the situation around."
Earlier this week, the United Nations asked China for information about the spill and offered to help assess the environmental damage but had yet to receive a response, an official said Friday.
"We need basic, official information from the Chinese side, which we do not have," said Vladimir Sakharov, who heads the Geneva-based Environmental Emergencies Section under the United Nations Environment Program and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Mr. Sakharov also said it would be impossible to compare the incident to other cases of river pollution or to assess how potentially damaging the spill could be without more information from China. "We have asked, we are still waiting," he said.
State television sought to depict the situation as under control, showing scores of workers installing new water-filtering material at the city's main water plant.
A total of 1,200 tons of activated carbon was trucked into Harbin Friday to help absorb the nitrobenzene in the river, Xinhua said. While benzene levels had fallen in recent days, levels of nitrobenzene in the river were more than 17 times acceptable standards on Friday, it said.
The decision to cut off Harbin's water supply Tuesday set off panic buying that cleared supermarket shelves of bottled water and other beverages. Authorities have since brought in truckloads of drinking water and ordered a price freeze to prevent overcharging.
The government has defended its handling of the spill. The Nov. 13 blast killed five people and forced the evacuation of 10,000 others. Authorities cited human error at a tower that processed benzene, a toxic, potentially cancer-causing chemical used in making plastics, detergents and pesticides.
The benzene spill reached Harbin early Thursday morning and was expected to take at least 40 hours to clear the city.
In neighboring Russia, concern was growing about 435 miles downriver in the border city of Khabarovsk. Officials told Russia's Itar-Tass news they weren't getting enough information from China.
Chinese authorities have placed blame for the disaster squarely on the plant's owner — China National Petroleum Corp., a state-owned company.
CNPC apologized for the disaster late Thursday in a statement carried by Xinhua.
Officials have said company personnel could face criminal charges over the spill.
Meanwhile, another chemical plant accident hundreds of miles away prompted fears of a second benzene leak and warnings to residents not to drink river water, Xinhua said.
The second incident was in Dianjiang, a county in the southwestern region of Chongqing, where an explosion at the Yingte Chemical Company on Thursday killed one worker, Xinhua said. Nearby schools were closed, and about 6,000 people were evacuated, the Beijing Daily Messenger newspaper reported.
Such incidents highlight the environmental damage caused by China's sizzling economic growth and complaints that the secretive communist government fails to enforce safety standards.
China ranks among countries with the smallest water supplies per person. Hundreds of cities regularly suffer shortages of water for drinking or industry. Protesters in rural areas claim pollution is ruining water supplies and damaging crops.
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