Toxic water crisis easing for Harbin
Bureau Report

HARBIN (China)—A surge of toxic chemicals pouring down the river through a northeastern Chinese city was expected to have passed through by early Sunday morning, bringing respite from a water crisis that has plagued residents.
As the nine million people in Harbin suffered a fourth day without running water, soldiers and workers raced to ensure the city’s water would be safe to drink when taps were turned back on, installing new filters at treatment plants, state media said.
The pipe network was shut down on Tuesday evening to protect Harbin residents from up to 100 tons of cancer-causing benzene compounds spilled into the Songhua river from which Harbin pumps its water. An explosion at a chemical plant upstream triggered the release of the toxins.
The spill could affect hundreds of thousands more people in China alone as it heads downstream, and then crosses into Russia, although officials say the concentration of toxins will fall as other tributaries join the river, the China Daily reported.
Benzene levels in Harbin were down to 2.3 times officially acceptable levels on Saturday compared to 30 times on Friday morning, the city government Web site said.
But the passage of the 80 km (50 mile) slick, flowing at around 2 km an hour, has been slowed by low water levels and lumps of ice that have already formed on the freezing water. Late on Friday, teams used picks and crowbars to break up the ice.
Harbin city officials told local newspapers they have prepared a plan to restore tap water to residents but urged caution.
“Don’t immediately drink the water,” says the plan, which calls on residents to be alert to any unusual odor or colors in the water. State television said some water would start flowing again in the early hours of Monday morning.
“I hope this is the last day I have to do this. It’s a big job taking the water upstairs,” said one resident, Zhu Wei, who was carrying two large vats of water from a government water truck to his fifth-storey apartment.
Some residents said they are worried the water might not be safe. “People don’t trust the plan. How can you ensure that all the poison is out of the system, and people won’t drink the water too soon, and restaurants won’t pass off tap water as bottled water?” said Wang Baoqing, a restaurant owner.
The crisis has raised questions about the environmental costs of China’s economic boom. Around 70 percent of China’s rivers are contaminated, and the State Council, or cabinet, recently described the state of the country’s environment as “grim”.
“This is going to encourage the people to have higher expectations. People are increasingly concerned about environmental issues...and this will be another stimulus,” said Zhang Wei, an expert on environmental issues and the media.
Beijing sent a team of investigators to probe the accident, while the chemical plant’s parent company China National Petroleum Corp has apologized for the pollution. One newspaper has accused officials of trying to hush up the disaster.
Even the state-run Xinhua News Agency called on officials to be more frank. “Telling the truth is the precondition for handling a public crisis,” it said in a commentary.
Chinese reporters covering the crisis in Harbin said editors had advised them some of their reports went too far, however, and they were expected to take the lead from Xinhua.
Environmentalists also have complained that China is not sharing enough information to help protect Russia’s rivers and its residents, including 1.5 million living in the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, which draws drinking water from the Songhua.
The pollution is expected to reach its water collection points by early December.
Some Harbin residents said the government should order the Jilin plant to shut down or move from its riverside location.
“What if this happens again? This is a long-term threat,” said Wang, the restaurant owner.

Chinese designer claims of building shock-proof dam

BEIJING—Military attacks, including atomic-bomb explosions, and natural disasters, such as earthquakes, have been considered in the design and construction of the Three Gorges Dam Project, officials said.
Conventional weapons, even heavy calibre bombs, can damage only the auxiliary facilities of the project, Wei Tingzheng, head of the project’s designing team, said during an interview with China Central Television (CCTV) on Thursday.
“We did a lot of research before deciding on the form of the dam by doing anti-explosion experiments and finally chose the current one, which has a triangle cross section,” Wei said.
The width of the dam is equal to its height, which helps consolidate its capacity to withstand an explosion, he said.
The gigantic Three Gorges Dam Project, the world’s largest in hydroelectric production, has an estimated price tag of 180 billion yuan (US$21.7 billion).
Launched in 1993, the Three Gorges Dam Project, including a 185-metre-high dam and 26 generators on both banks of the Yangtze River, is being built in three phases on its middle reaches.
According to a construction schedule, the project will be able to generate 84.7 billion kilowatt-hours of electrical power annually when it is expected to be finished in 2008.
“We also took into account the possibility that the dam would be subjected to possible atomic bombs,” whether they explode in the air, in the water or directly target the dam itself, Wei said.
Direct targeting at the dam, intended to cause its collapse and result in flooding into nearby cities, is the worst scenario, the designer said.
But Wei added, major cities such as Shanghai and Wuhan, capital of Central China’s Hubei Province, will not suffer to any great degree as flood-relief channels have been built up.
Referring to the possible impact of earthquakes on the project, Wei said such worries were minimal because of the dam’s location.
“The dam’s base is set on a granite layer, where no one earthquake exceeding 4-magnitude has ever occurred,” he said.
Various doubts and objections concerning alleged overspending and environmental damage have assailed the project from the day it was proposed and continued through planning, design and construction.
About 1.13 million local people were targeted for relocation from their ancestral habitats in the water diversion project area. Pu Haiqing, director of the Three Gorges Project Construction Committee under the State Council, told CCTV that more than 1.06 million residents in the Three Gorges Dam area have been successfully relocated in the past two decades.
“Most of the resettled people are satisfied with their new lives, enjoying better living conditions,” Pu said.
As of the end of August, the central government had earmarked nearly 49 billion yuan (US$6 billion) to relocate residents, remove enterprises, build houses and reconfigure infrastructure facilities, he said.         (The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item)

Chinese Premier inspects clean-up as Harbin prepares to turn taps back on

HARBIN—An 80-kilometer-long (50-mile-long) belt of toxic benzene had largely flowed downstream past northeast China’s Harbin city as Premier Wen Jiabao arrived to inspect clean-up efforts. Wen’s arrival comes after a central government team was dispatched to help coordinate relief efforts and investigate a 10-day delay in announcing the toxic spill to the public.
Water supplies to the city’s 3.8 million residents were expected to resume Sunday, city officials said, as the slick moved past the capital of Heilongjiang province and headed toward the Russian border. The environmental disaster began when some 100 tons of benzene was dumped into the river after a huge explosion at a chemical plant on November 13 in neighboring Jilin province some 380 kilometers up river.
The calamity has been widely seen as a reflection of China’s dismal environmental situation which has been largely ignored during 25 years of fast- paced economic growth. The government has scrambled to avoid a health crisis by trucking in massive supplies of bottled water and sinking new wells around the city after water supplies were cut off late Tuesday.
“I hope that you make all efforts to ensure that measures are taken to guarantee the people can have safe and drinkable water,” Wen said at a Harbin water supply plant where workers were installing a new water filtration system. Wen said he hoped “that we will not allow any more interruptions in the public water system again”.
Pollution levels on the river which were 100 times above national standards at the peak of the disaster, fell to 33 times normal levels early Friday before dropping to nine times above the safe water standard Friday night, the city’s environmental protection agency said. “This morning the levels of nitrobenzene in the river was about double the national standard ... the levels are continuing to fall,” one environmental official surnamed Wu told reporters.
Major tributaries to the Songhua river below Harbin would help further dilute the pollution as it made its way to the Russian border some 600 kilometers away, he said. The spill occurred when the explosion flattened a PetroChina chemical factory in Jilin city.
The government refused to admit the environmental disaster until Wednesday — 10 days later — when it said the river had been polluted with cancer-causing benzene, the more dangerous nitrobenzene and other chemicals. The team of investigators from Beijing included disciplinary officials, indicating that “punishments of irresponsible acts are on the way,” Xinhua news agency reported.
Saturday’s Heilongjiang Morning News accused top officials in Jilin province and at the chemical factory of not only trying to mask the spill but also refusing to take responsibility for the alleged cover up. “The right to make news announcements in situations like this does not lie with us, it belongs to the city’s (Communist Party) propaganda bureau,” one unnamed Jilin environmental protection agency official was quoted as saying.
Earlier the China Youth Daily published an account of the cover up that led to widespread confusion and the panic buying of water and supplies last weekend, including a wild rumor of a pending earthquake. “If information is not given in a timely, accurate and transparent manner, it will leave room for rumors to spread,” the paper said.
The government only confirmed the extent of the disaster as the pollution slick entered the city. Other residents upstream in Jilin province said they were unaware of the toxic belt of benzene until well after it had passed their homes.
“No one has told us about it,” a resident of Wujiazhan, a town of about 50,000 people some 150 kilometers downstream from Jilin city, told AFP. “We only heard about it from the television when it (the pollution) had arrived in Harbin,” the resident surnamed Wu said.

UNESCO moot begins tomorrow

BEIJING—Federal Education Minister Lt. Gen. (Retd) Javed Ashraf Qazi will represent Pakistan at the three-day UNESCO’s conference, being held here on Monday. The conference on Education for All (EFA) will focus on illiteracy elimination and global rural education. Sources told APP that top-level officials from about 50 countries will gather to discuss ways and means as how to accelerate progress towards Education for All by 2015.
It will also review the progress towards the EFA goals, in order to translate them into reality. The sources hoped that the conference’s deliberations will help the member countries to promote good governance in education systems as well as to mobilize further external aid and use it more effectively. The conference, to be inaugurated by the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will also provide platform for deeper and stronger partnerships with national and international partners in EFA.
During the visit, Javed Ashraf is likely to hold talks with Chinese counterpart Zhou Ji to review their on-going cooperation in the education sector. According to an official of the Chinese Education Ministry, the bilateral cooperation between the two sides, especially at the level of higher education increased tremendously in the recent years. The Chinese government, he said attached great importance to mutual visits of delegations, exchanges of students and scholars, inter-institutional collaboration, the exchange of teaching materials and cooperation in language teaching and academic research.—APP

 

Chinese women prefer spending on clothes

BEIJING—Chinese women like to spend their disposable income on clothes and staying fit, while men prefer to spend their extra cash on books, smokes and booze, a recent survey indicates. Sociologists surveyed 2,351 local residents between the ages of 18 and 64 to find out how they spend their money, and see what differences there are between the two genders and various age groups. Men said their top four expense, after housing and food, are books and study, cigarettes and alcohol, social events and clothing. Clothing topped the list for women, followed by books and study, tonics and fitness, and social events.—APP