Russian City Cuts Water Supplies to 10,000

By YURAS KARMANAU

KHABAROVSK, Russia – Authorities in the far eastern Russian city of Khabarovsk cut off water supplies to 10,000 people Wednesday as a toxic slick from China floated downriver toward the city.

Regional officials said that tests conducted in the Amur River, which flows past the city of 580,000 and provides it with all its water supplies, so far had not detected chemicals above permissible levels.

But residents of three southern districts woke up to find notices posted outside their apartment blocks with a list of hazardous chemicals that could be in the water supply and their effects. The notice warned them not to try to siphon hot water from their centrally heated radiators.

“We have been obliged to partly cut off water in some districts, but I hope this is a temporary measure,” said Vladimir Popov, the regional official in charge of efforts to combat the effects of the chemical emergency.

A spokeswoman for the regional administration, Natalya Zimina, said that 10,000 people in the three districts were without water supplies as of Wednesday.

The spill from a Chinese chemical factory explosion last month was about 20 miles up the Amur River from city limits, and it was unclear when exactly it would arrive, Sergei Levkov, a regional administration spokesman, told The Associated Press.

The pollutant slick, stretching 110 miles, was expected to take up to four days or more to pass through Khabarovsk. Popov said water supplies to other parts of the city should be unaffected if the concentration of chemicals remained below the maximum acceptable norms.

The Nov. 13 chemical plant explosion dumped 100 tons of toxins into northeastern China’s Songhua River, disrupting water supplies to millions of Chinese and straining relations with neighboring Russia.

In districts affected by the water shutdown, people bundled up in thick coats and hats against subzero temperatures came to collect water in buckets and plastic bottles from cisterns provided by city authorities.

One of them, Lyudmilla Shevshenko, accused authorities of keeping them in the dark.

“People came to work today and half of them didn’t even know they would cut off the water at 9 a.m. and didn’t have the time to collect any reserves. They arrived dirty and angry. What kind of behavior is that?” she said in comments broadcast on the NTV channel.

The deputy director of a local school, Natalya Falbeichits, said that classes had been canceled to allow the teachers to stock up on water from the cisterns.

“I told my pupils that water is life. Now water has turned into hell,” she said.

Authorities had warned that they might have to shut down the central heating system – provided through water heated at central facilities in the city – to stop the chemicals from entering municipal pipes, but on Wednesday that threat appeared to have receded.

Russia has labored since the news of the spill to try to minimize the effect on Khabarovsk by using tons of charcoal to filter the water and building temporary dams.

But a dam hastily built by Chinese workers piling sand and rock across a waterway in a bid to prevent the toxins from reaching three water treatment facilities that service the south of the city was not completed in time, which prompted the cutoff of water supplies on Wednesday.