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China suffers another toxic waste spill

Toxic wastewater was flushed untreated into a river in southern China, prompting the government to cut water supplies to 28,000 people for at least four days, a local official and the official China Daily newspaper said yesterday.

The paper said that a power plant on the upper reaches of the Yuexi River in Sichuan Province was to blame for the pollution, prompting environmental officials to suspend water supplies to Guanyin Township since last week.

A town leader reached by telephone said on condition of anonymity that 28,000 people had been without water since last Tuesday evening. He blamed the pollution on a power plant in nearby Xinqiao County, which had discharged untreated wastewater directly into the Yuexi.

Fire trucks were being used to bring clean water to residents but supplies were short, he said. There were no reports so far of people falling sick because of the pollution, he said.

A man who answered the phone at the Xinqiao Power Plant said poor quality coal may have been partially to blame for the pollution and that an investigation was underway. The plant had temporarily halted power generation, said the man, who would only give his surname, Yang.

An employee with a local water supply company noticed the river water had turned yellow last Tuesday, the China Daily said. Tests showed it was polluted with high levels of fluoride, nitrogen and phenol, it said.

The incident follows a spate of spills in recent months, the most serious being an explosion at a chemical plant in November that dumped chemicals into the Songhua River, the source of drinking water for tens of millions of people living in northeastern China and Russia.

Local authorities were criticized for reacting too slowly to the chemical plant explosion and delaying disclosure to the public.

Under new regulations enacted earlier this month, serious accidents must be reported directly to the Environmental Protection Agency, known as SEPA, or to the State Council, China's Cabinet, within an hour.

After more than 25 years of breakneck growth, China is in the midst of an environmental crisis that has continued to worsen as local authorities fail to enforce regulations meant to counter severe air and water pollution.

An official who answered the telephone at SEPA said that she was not authorized to give information about chemical spills to foreign media and referred the call to another number which rang unanswered. The official refused to give her name.

A man who answered the phone at the Sichuan Environmental Protection Agency referred calls to another number, which also rang unanswered.

Since the Nov. 13 spill in the Songhua River, SEPA had received 45 reports of environmental accidents as of Feb. 1, six of them serious.
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