Toxic chemicals that contaminated a river after a blast at a factory in China last month flowed into the Russian city of Khabarovsk on Thursday, but officials said concentrations were low so far and posed negligible danger for human health.
”We are taking measurements every three hours at many points,” said Valentina Zozylina, senior laboratory engineer with the Institute of Tectonics and Geophysics with the Russian Academy of Science, who confirmed that toxic nitrobenzene had been detected in waters in Khabarovsk.
She said, however, that the highest concentrations detected so far in the wider Khabarovsk region were well below acceptable limits and were substantially lower in the waters within the limits of the city itself, where about 600 000 people live.
The spill was caused by an explosion at a chemical factory in China on November 13 that resulted in tonnes of benzene, a known carcinogen, being dumped in the Songhua River, a tributary of the Amur that runs along the Russia-Chinese border before entering Russian territory above Khabarovsk.
Experts explained that virtually all the benzene that entered the river then have long since evaporated, but concentrations of nitrobenzene, a benzene derivative that can also pose dangers to human health, are still in the river.
Effects on people from excessive exposure to nitrobenzene range widely from drowsiness to death.
Second Chinese city stops using river
Meanwhile, a second Chinese city has stopped drawing its drinking water from a southern river after a toxic spill, switching to a hastily installed back-up system to move reservoir water to 100 000 residents, the government said on Thursday.
The city of Yingde, in Guangdong province, north of Hong Kong, stopped drawing water from the tainted Bei River late on Wednesday evening, the official Xinhua news agency said.
It said the city switched to water drawn from a reservoir through a 1,4km-long pipe that the local government rushed to install after the spill from a smelter upstream.
The report said the system is continuing to supply running water to the city’s inhabitants.
On Tuesday, the city of Shaoguan, where the smelter accident occurred, shut off running for about eight hours. — Sapa-AP, Sapa-AFP