Waste water discharged from a chemical factory has polluted a river in southern China and affected the drinking water of 40,000 villagers living along its banks, state media and a local official said yesterday.
An 8km stretch of the Sancha River in Guangdong Province has been tainted by the factory which "illegally discharged polluted water and caused the incident," the official Xinhua News Agency said late on Friday.
It did not give any details on what kind of chemicals were involved but said that dead fish and shrimp have been found in the water.
"There was a very strong smell the morning of April 26. The water looks murky," the head of Changqi town, where 40,000 people from seven villages have been warned against drinking from the river, said in a telephone interview.
He refused to give his name, as is customary with Chinese officials.
The factory is located in Huazhou, a city upstream from Changqi. Xinhua did not release its name.
The town head said the pollution had sickened a few people but none needed to be hospitalized and all had recovered. Some livestock and poultry also died, he said.
Villagers have been told not to drink river water, eat dead fish or use river water for irrigation, he said.
Environmental officials are taking water samples every day for testing, he said.
"Now the smell is not so strong," he said. "We can't predict when things will go back to normal."
One villager who gave only her surname, Hong, said she had been drinking well water since the local government posted notices about the pollution.
Xinhua said that government officials in Wuchuan, which oversees Changqi, have taken emergency measures to prevent the dead fish and shrimp from being sold at markets.
Most of China's canals, rivers and lakes are severely tainted by industrial, agricultural and household pollution. Only about a third of the 3.3 billion tonnes of waste water discharged by Chinese cities each year is treated.
Earlier this month, the country's chief environmental regulator said China has suffered 76 environmental accidents -- or one every two days -- since a toxic river spill last year in the northeast.
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