Sprol

A 50-mile stew of toxic benzene floated up the Songhua River for 10 days before Chinese authorities acknowledged the severity of what has been the most serious river pollution in recent memory here. Not until the dense mess hit the major city of Harbin last week was it no longer possible to cover up the catastrophe – highlighting a penchant for secrecy that has characterized political behavior here for decades.
Christian Science Monitor

The disaster has become political as well as environmental: there was a cascade of public fury over the disclosure that Communist party officials covered up the leak on November 13, then lied to the citizens of Harbin, setting off mass panic and an exodus from the city.

A diplomatic catastrophe is looming, too. The slick is now oiling its way down the slowly freezing Songhua to the border with Russia, where it joins the mighty Heilongjiang, the Black Dragon River, then flows past the Siberian city of Khabarovsk. And the Russians have only just been told.
Times

Hundreds of thousands of people living in towns and villages along the upper reaches of the Songhua river were allowed to continue using toxic water for more than a week, even though authorities knew that benzene levels were lethally high, Chinese officials have admitted.
news telegraph

The slick is expected to continue floating along the Songhua and into neighbouring Russia by way of the Amur river. Several riverside towns and cities in Russia are on alert, including the city of Khabarovsk, about 700 kilometres from Harbin. Russians are stocking up on mineral water and officials are digging emergency wells in case the benzene is still dangerous by the time it arrives, in about two weeks.
CBC News

The disaster was caused by a chemical plant explosion in Jilin province, northeast China, on Nov. 13, which heavily polluted a regional river called the Songhua River, Zhang said, adding that the major pollutants from the accident had been identified as benzene, aniline and nitrobenzene.
XINHUA

Reached by phone, an environmental official in Songyuan, a city of more than 400,000 located between Jilin and Harbin, confirmed that officials there were told of the spill but chose to keep it secret. The official, who asked to be identified only by a surname, Li, said the city shut off the part of its water system that is linked to the river but told the public it was just doing repairs.

A water industry official in Harbin, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it was likely that farmers and others living in rural areas between Jilin and Harbin were not informed of the spill and drank or used the contaminated water. Benzene poisoning can cause anemia, some forms of cancer and other blood disorders, as well as kidney and liver damage.

Harbin officials learned of the slick on Nov. 18 and began discussing a shutdown of the municipal water supply the next day. But it was not until Nov. 21, when officials were confronted with tests showing pollution at more than 100 times acceptable levels, that they told the public of the plan to shut down the water supply. Even then, the city announced only that the reason for doing so was to “carry out repair and inspections on the pipe network.”
San Francisco Chronicle

A Shanghai newspaper, the News Morning Post, reported that government officials in Jilin told their downstream neighbors in Heilongjiang Province, home of Harbin, that there had been no chemical spill. But Jilin officials finally told their peers in Heilongjiang on Nov. 19 that there was a problem.

The China Youth Daily reported that environmental officials in Jilin – instead of telling the public – had tried to dilute the spill with reservoir water.
International Herald-Tribune

Nov 26th, 2005 – ANOTHER chemical plant has exploded in China, spewing toxic benzene into the water supply of a central region as authorities in the country’s north-east struggle to protect millions of people from an earlier spill.

The blast on Thursday at the Yingte Chemical Co in Dianjiang, part of the huge Chongqing municipality straddling the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, killed one worker and forced the evacuation of 6000 nearby residents and the closure of schools.

People in the area were warned not to drink water from the local river, a tributary of the Yangtze, because of concern that carcinogenic benzene had spilled.

In Harbin, whose 4 million people yesterday endured their third day without tap-water, officials evacuated small settlements on the banks and islands of the Songhua River as an 80-kilometre slick of benzene flowed by.
Sydney Morning Herald

Today’s chemical plant accident prompted fears of a further benzene leak and warnings to residents not to drink river water, Xinhua reported today. It happened at the Yingte Chemical Company in Dianjiang, in the south-western region of Chongqing, where one worker was killed.

Nearby schools were closed and around 6,000 people were evacuated, the Beijing Daily Messenger newspaper said.
Guardian