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.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS