A city of more than half a million people was forced to cut off its water supply as a toxic slick slowly moved down one of China’s large rivers towards the Russian border, state media said on Monday.
The taps were turned off Sunday in Jiamusi, home to 550 000 people, as the potentially lethal chemical pool approached along the Songhua river in China’s northeast province of Heilongjiang, the China Daily reported.
Warnings were posted along the river bank in Jiamusi ordering people not to draw water from the river, or to swim or fish in it, according to the paper.
State-run Xinhua news agency reported the 150km slick, slowed down by icy water, would hit Jiamusi during Tuesday.
Jiamusi and other large cities along the Songhua river are paying the price of one of the country’s worst industrial accidents on record in recent years.
A blast at a PetroChina chemical plant upstream on November 13 released 100 tonnes of benzene and nitrobenzene into the Songhua, which provides much of the drinking water to urban communities in northeast China.
The ramifications of the accident dawned upon China and the world late last month as the slick passed through Harbin, a city of nearly four million urban residents, causing the water supply to be cut for five days.
The area may also have to live with the aftermath of the toxic spill for a long time to come, the Xinhua report suggested.
Li Haitao, mayor of Jiamusi, warned the pollutants were likely to form sediments on the banks of an island in the river, resulting in long-term contamination of drinking water.
As the toxic slick moves downriver, it will eventually enter Russia, highlighting the cross-border nature of a lot of the pollution that is taking place in modern China.
Chinese authorities are filing daily reports to the Russian side about the situation in the Songhua river.
As of Monday morning, the slick was still 323km from Sanjiangkou, where the Songhua meets the Amur, the border river dividing Russia and China, Xinhua said.
On Sunday, the level of the nitrobenzene in the slick was still more than 10 times the national safety standards, according to Xinhua.
The fall-out among Chinese officials and politicians from the blast at the PetroChina factory also continued.
Yu Li, the general manager of plant owner Jilin Petroleum and Chemical, was removed from his office on Sunday following a decision by parent company PetroChina, one of the nation’s oil majors, the China News Service reported.
Although Yu had behaved in a proper manner after the blast, the decision to remove him was made in view of the “serious consequences of the incident,” the news service said on Monday.
Xie Zhenhua, the head of the ministry-level State Environmental Protection Administration, quit his post on Friday over the incident.
Other senior officials at the factory have also been removed from their posts amid a police investigation. – AFP