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Jilin, PetroChina apologize for chemical spill
(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2005-11-24 14:10
The Party head of Jilin City, where a chemical plant exploded on November 13,
and the plant's owner, PetroChina Company Ltd, have apologized to Harbin
residents for the contamination of the Songhua River, the main water supply
point for Harbin, Beijing News reported Thursday.
The Harbin government cut the city's water supply for four days because of
fears of contamination and many schools in the city have been shut until
next Wednesday.
PetroChina has offered 60 water tankers to Harbin and helped to dig wells for
ground water.
For Harbin, a city with about 4 million residents in urban areas, the water
stoppage means inconvenience and difficulty greater than people could imagine.
People in Jilin Province seldom drink water from the Songhua, but 90 percent
of the drinking water in Harbin comes from it, said Zhai Pingyang, an official
of Heilongjiang environment institute.
He said many chemical plants beside the Songhua in Jilin Province had been
pouring polluted water into the river for decades and the two provinces had
negotiated about the situation many times.
Even after Harbin announced to suspend drinking water supply citywide due to
river pollution, the Jilin petrochemical company, where the powerful blasts
occurred on November 13, insisted that the blasts caused no pollution to the
river.
Today, the petrochemical plant remains silent after the State Environmental
Protection Agency and its parent company PetroChina confirmed the pollution
accident.
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