China to Spend $3 Billion to Clean River

BEIJING – China will invest $3.3 billion over the next five years to clean up the Songhua River, a key source of drinking water for tens of millions of people that was polluted in November by a toxic spill that reached into Russia, reports said Sunday.

The pollution control efforts will cover the entire river valley spanning four provinces and including more than 62 million people, the Beijing Youth Daily reported.

By 2010, more than 90 percent of the people living in the four provinces should have access to clean drinking water, the paper quoted environmental officials meeting in Harbin, capital of Heilongjian province, as saying. It was unclear where that percentage stands now.

The plan comes weeks after an explosion at a chemical plant spewed benzene into the Songhua, disrupting running water to millions of people in both China and Russia.

It also comes as two provinces in central China issued pollution warnings for their own local water supplies.

One of the warnings, in central China’s Henan province, was lifted following a diesel oil leak on Thursday in the Yellow River, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. In Hunan province, cadmium leaked into a tributary of the Yangtze River during a routine cleaning of waste water draining pipes, said an official at the province’s environmental protection bureau, who would not give her name because she is not authorized to talk to the media.