Chinese authorities rushed to soak up a toxic coal tar spill from a river before it reached a city reservoir, but area villagers said the water had already been filthy and undrinkable for years.
About 10,000 people were helping use straw mats, cotton quilts and 70 tonnes of activated carbon on Saturday to soak up 60 tonnes of toxic sludge spilled last Monday into the Dasha River (
It said 100 trucks and earth movers had been used to dump earth into the river to form 51 dams, slowing its flow to a near standstill.
PHOTO: AP
In addition, 500 holes had been dug in the ground near the river to divert the spill, it said.
The spill occurred when a truck, overloaded with coal tar, crashed and its contents spilled into the water.
Xinhua said the driver failed to tell traffic officials that he had been carrying coal tar when he first reported the accident, delaying the initial cleanup efforts.
On Saturday, villagers who live on the river said they had not used its water for years because it already seemed extremely polluted.
A woman who would only give her surname, Gao, said by telephone that waste from nearby iron mines had made the water unusable for the past four to five years.
Gao said she lives a few minutes from the river in Shentangbu town, a few kilometers downstream from the spill site.
A truck driver who lives along the river with his daughter, wife and parents in a small single-story house said it was impossible to tell which mines were responsible for the pollution because there were so many in the area.
The man, who would only give his surname, Gao, said his family had not used the Dasha river water "in years." It wasn't clear if he and the woman were related. Gao is a very common name in the area, he said.
Shanxi Province relies heavily on its mining industry and is one of China's top coal and iron producers.
Most of China's canals, rivers and lakes are severely tainted by industrial, agricultural and household pollution.
Only a bit more than a third of the 3.7 billion tonnes of waste water discharged by China's huge cities each year is treated.
Officials from the Environmental Protection Bureaus of Shanxi province, where the spill occurred, and Anhui Province, where Baoding is located, confirmed Xinhua's description of the cleanup effort on Saturday. They refused to give their names.
They said it was unclear how polluted the river was previously.
Another woman from Shentangbu, who would only give her surname, Wang, said the pollution seemed much worse since the spill last Monday.
"The river is all yellow and it smells really terrible," she said.
The smell reminded her of tar and gas, she said by telephone.
Photos taken near the crash site showed massive pools of black sludge mixed with river water, while stretches downstream were yellow from piles of earth that had been dumped into the river to slow it down.
Since the accident, the coal tar has traveled approximately 17km downstream and on Saturday was about 53km from Baoding's Wangkuai Reservoir, Xinhua said.
Coal tar is linked to increased rates of certain types of cancer after prolonged exposure. Measurements on Friday showed that levels of phenol were 100 times higher than acceptable in some spots.
A man at the Baoding City Environmental Protection Bureau who would only give his surname, Qin, said on Thursday that the Wangkuai was not used for drinking water but for irrigation and industry.
He said a second city reservoir, the Xidanyang, was a dedicated drinking water source.
It was the latest in a series of mishaps to degrade the country's already polluted waterways. Officials said there have been at least 76 water pollution accidents in the last six months.
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