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Toxic spill heads for Russia, China offers help
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-11-29 17:10
Thousands of children returned to school in China's Harbin city on Tuesday a
week after a toxic spill prompted officials to turn off the water taps and now
threatens supplies for more than a million Russians downstream.
An explosion at a chemical plant in the northeastern Chinese city of Jilin on
November 13 poured 100 tonnes of cancer-causing benzene compounds into the
Songhua river upstream of Harbin, a city of nine million people.
Officials cut off the water in Harbin before the 80-km (50-mile) slick
arrived. It has since cleared the city but will arrive at a major city in
Russia's far east within days.
Harbin, in Heilongjiang province, reopened its taps on Sunday after five
days. True to his word, provincial governor Zhang Zuoji drank the first glass of
tap water to prove it was safe.
The city's 400,000 primary and secondary school students returned to school
on Tuesday after a week-long break with many bringing bottled water from home,
state media said.
Many residents were sceptical that the warter is safe to drink.
"The water was red when it resumed. Now, it's yellow like the color of tea.
It doesn't smell but it's not safe to drink yet," a 40-year-old resident named
Zhou said.
Last weekend China apologised to Russia for the river water crisis. It has
now agreed to provide monitoring equipment to its neighbor and help train
Russian personnel as the toxic slick nears the Siberian border, the Chinese
State Environmental Protection Administration said on its Web site.
Russia's environmental watchdog said on Monday the spill could reach the
first Russian settlements in the next two to three days, while the Emergencies
Ministry said it could start affecting the major Siberian city of Khabarovsk by
December 10-12.
Russian television footage showed shops unloading bottled water supplies
while scientists pushed aside lumps of ice to test the Amur river, which is fed
by the Songhua -- Sungari in Russian. More than 1 million people could be
affected.
Although officials say the slick should be less toxic by the time it crosses
into Russia, chief state epidemiologist Gennady Onishchenko has noted that the
dangerous compounds would have been diluted faster had the river been in full
flow rather than half-frozen.
Benzene poisoning causes anemia, other blood disorders and kidney and liver
damage.
In Bayan county in suburban Harbin, tests showed the level of nitro-benzene
in the water at 0.1994 milligrams per liter, 10.73 times acceptable levels, the
environment administration said.
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