Khabarovsk, Russia: Authorities appealed for calm yesterday as a toxic spill from China flowed into the Russian far eastern city of Khabarovsk, weeks after a chemical explosion spewed deadly toxins into a river upstream.
The slick, which extends for 180km, entered the city limits toward evening, said Natalya Zimina, a spokeswoman for the regional administration. She added that pollution levels in the Amur River were within the norm and water supplies to the city of 580,000 would be maintained.
"We have done everything we could to safeguard and filter the water and we do not plan to cut off water to Khabarovsk," said Governor Viktor Ishayev.
He appealed to anxious inhabitants of the city "to keep calm". On November 13, a chemical plant explosion in China's northeast spewed nearly 91 metric tonnes of benzene, nitrobenzene and other toxins into the Songhua River, causing the city of Harbin to shut down running water to 3.8 million people for five days.
The slick has been floating downriver and entered Russian territory last week, sparking increasing alarm in Khabarovsk, where residents in the last few hours rushed to stock up on drinking water and filled up their apartments with water to wash and cook with.
A telephone hotline has been flooded by calls from worried residents, such as shop assistant Irina Zakonnikova. Her small apartment, which she shares with her husband and two teenage children, is crammed with bottles, pots and other receptacles filled with water. Even the bath is full.
The family stopped using tap water yesterday, despite the fact that callers to the hotline were being assured that it was "absolutely safe" to wash and cook with running water.
"We are trying to keep ourselves from panicking but of course there is fear," she said.
Tonnes of carbon are being used to filter out contamination from water supplies taken from the Amur River, which normally provides the city on the border with China with all its water. Late yesterday, the news finally came that many had dreaded. "The spill has arrived in the city. Tests have confirmed the presence of nitrobenzene in the water. But the concentration does not exceed the maximum acceptable levels and we are not planning to switch off the water supply in Khabarovsk," the regional official Zimina told The Associated Press.
But reinforcing suspicion about the authorities' efforts to reassure the population, a senior environmental official said it was unsafe to use tap water at all. "Residents have stocked up on water and this should be enough to last them for two to three days," said Vladimir Ott, the regional chief of the Federal Natural Resources Service.
The pollutant slick could take at least four days to pass through Khabarovsk but experts warn the ecological effects will be long-lasting.
Second spill affects Chinese water supply
A second Chinese city stopped drawing drinking water from a southern river after a toxic spill, the government said yesterday, as the business centre of Guangzhou rushed to protect water supplies to its 7 million people.
The leak from a smelter into the Bei River north of Hong Kong was China's second environmental disaster in six weeks, following a chemical spill on a northeastern river that disrupted water supplies in China and flowed into Russia.
The area hit by the latest spill is one of China's most densely populated and is home to thousands of factories that form the heart of the country's booming export industries.
The city of Yingde, upstream from Guangzhou, stopped using water from the Bei late on Wednesday, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It said the city of 210,000 people switched to supplies drawn from a nearby reservoir through a hastily installed 1.4-km-long pipe.
The move came after Xinhua said Guangzhou and the nearby city of Foshan were ordered to "start emergency plans to ensure safe drinking water supplies". It didn't say what the cities were told to do.
