• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

China Blames Oil Firm for Spill

Posted on: Friday, 25 November 2005, 12:00 CST

By David Lague

The government on Thursday blamed China's biggest oil company for a pollution spill that allowed an 80-kilometer slick of toxic benzene to reach this northern city of almost four million people on a river that normally supplies it with running water.

In this increasingly unwashed and unflushed city, residents continued to stockpile bottled drinking water for a second day after the authorities stopped pumping from the Songhua River to minimize the risk of poisoning.

With the municipal water system shut down, schools and many businesses remained closed and restaurants in the city center were mostly empty late Thursday as one of China's worst environmental disasters forced the authorities to mount an investigation that could lead to criminal charges.

China has warned its neighbor Russia about the toxic spill, which is being carried toward the border city of Khabarovsk.

An explosion on Nov. 13 at a plant run by the China National Petroleum Corp., known as CNPC, in Jilin Province, 380 kilometers, or 235 miles, upriver from Harbin, spewed an estimated 100 tons of benzene compounds into the river, the authorities said.

State media reported Thursday that five people were killed in the explosion only a few hundred meters from the river bank. Up to 10,000 people were temporarily evacuated.

"We will be very clear about who's responsible," Zhang Lijun, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, said at a news conference in Beijing. "It is the chemical plant of the CNPC in Jilin Province." Zhang did not elaborate, but he said an investigation would consider if there was any criminal liability for the spill.

PetroChina, a New York and Hong Kong-listed subsidiary of CNPC, is responsible for the company's domestic petrochemical production according to the CNPC Web site. The state-owned CNPC holds 90 percent of PetroChina's shares.

The official Xinhua news agency reported that the company had apologized for the contamination.

The company "deeply regrets" the spill and would take responsibility for handling the consequences, CNPC's deputy general manager, Zeng Yukang, was quoted as saying.

The vice governor of Jilin Province, Jiao Zhengzhong, also apologized to the people of Harbin, according to a report Thursday in the newspaper Beijing News.

The contamination of one of China's major rivers has drawn attention to the environmental price that this country is paying for an economic boom lasting three decades. Living standards have risen dramatically in many regions of China, particularly the provinces along the east coast, but severe environmental degradation has emerged as a threat to further development.

China's major cities are among the most polluted in the world, and vast tracts of farmland are being lost to erosion, desertification and industry.

But it is the pollution of vital rivers, lakes and groundwater in a vast nation that is already short of water that looms as the biggest immediate threat, environmental experts say.

Even before the benzene spill, there were serious problems with water quality along the 1,850-kilometer Songhua River, according to the Asian Development Bank. The bank said in a July 19 statement that 62 million people lived in the Songhua River catchment area.

"The Songhua River, however, is one of the most polluted of the 47 major rivers in" the People's Republic of China, it said.

"Contaminated with a number of organic chemicals, heavy metals and other conventional pollutants, the river is considered unsuitable for municipal domestic water use."

The bank is helping local authorities to develop plans for pollution control along the river.

The environmental impact of development is also forcing China's government to become increasingly open with a public that has become more vocal about pollution and some ill-considered industrial projects.

Nongovernmental organizations working to protect the environment are flourishing and have occasionally persuaded the authorities to block or change development projects.

Along with assurances that adequate supplies of drinking water would be trucked in, the authorities in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang Province, warned residents to be on guard for the symptoms of benzene poisoning.

They said that the slick was expected to have passed the city by Saturday and that water supplies could be restored by Sunday.

After an early period of panic buying when supermarkets and shops were stripped of bottled water and drinks, calm returned when the local authorities trucked in enough fresh water to keep up with demand. Some businesses and hotels have organized alternative water supplies to maintain services.

"Our hotel has a 600-ton tank that gets refilled every day," said Linda Zhang, the communications manager of the Harbin Shangri-La Hotel. "We have eight trucks bringing in water drawn from local springs. We don't have a problem."

Provincial and central government environmental agencies reported that benzene and nitrobenzene contamination much higher than the maximum levels allowed had been detected upstream from Harbin.

The state news media have aggressively covered the spill with news reports of panic buying of bottled water and photographs of dead fish in the river.

The official China Daily reported Thursday that experts believed the authorities had no choice but to cut water supplies to the city.

"Harbin's move to cut off the water supply was not a knee-jerk reaction," Zhang Lanying, an environmental expert from Jilin University, was quoted as saying.

"If the contaminated water had been supplied to households, the result would have been unimaginable."

Apart from the danger to the Chinese population and environment, the spill could also have diplomatic repercussions as it heads toward the point where the Songhua River joins the Heilongjiang River, which then crosses the Russian border in the region of Khabarovsk, about 550 kilometers downriver from Harbin.

Senior Chinese officials rejected suggestions that it had been unfair to wait until this week to inform their neighbor about the spill.

Russian officials have begun testing water in the river.

Zhang, from the Environmental Protection Administration, said it would be another 14 days before the contamination reached the Heilongjiang, which flows into Russia.

"So we don't think we were late in providing information," he said. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao, said the Russian Embassy in Beijing had been briefed twice this week and the two sides had set up a hot line for further information sharing. "The Chinese side attaches great importance to the potential impact and harm caused by the pollution on our neighbor Russia," he said at a news briefing Thursday.

Source: International Herald Tribune

More News in this Category