China considers dam to shield Russian city from toxic spill

China is considering building a dam to reduce the impact of a river-borne toxic spill expected to arrive in a Russian city early next week, a government newspaper said today.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong media reported the apparent suicide of an official in the upstream city of Jilin, where a November 13 chemical plant explosion caused the spill. Vice Mayor Wang Wei was found hanged, the Ta Kung Pao newspaper reported.

China’s government has vowed to punish anyone found responsible for the explosion or spill. The head of the country’s industrial safety agency warned this week that anyone who tried to hide evidence would be punished.

The spill dumped 100 tonnes of benzene and other chemicals into north-eastern China’s Songhua River, disrupting water supplies to millions of Chinese and straining relations with Moscow.

The Songhua flows into the Heilong River, which merges with the Wusuli River in the Russian border city of Khabarovsk to become the Amur.

The temporary dam would be built on a waterway linking the Heilong and Wusuli, which supplies water for homes and businesses in Khabarovsk, the official China Daily newspaper said. The Wusuli is known in Russian as the Ussuri.

The spot was chosen because the water is only three feet deep and moves slowly at this time of year, the newspaper said. It said Chinese experts arrived on Tuesday in the north-eastern city of Jiamusi to study a Russian proposal for the dam.

China’s plan adds to its increasingly ambitious efforts to contain human, economic and diplomatic damage from the incident.

China has apologised to Russia and promised this week to work closely with Moscow to minimise the spill’s impact. Beijing has already sent pollution monitoring equipment and 150 tonnes of activated carbon for water filtration in Khabarovsk, a city of 580,000 people.

Russian officials were trying to calculate when the chemicals would cross the border. The nation’s Emergency Situations Ministry anticipates pollutants in the Amur will worsen after Saturday, when the advance front of the spill was expected to hit, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

The head of the Far East branch of the Meteorological Agency, Alexander Gavrilov, said in Khabarovsk that the main chemical flow would enter the Amur no sooner than December 19 and reach the city by December 25. His comments were broadcast on Rossiya state television.

Chinese engineers intended to build the dam in the next four days, ITAR-Tass said. Russian engineers were already working to increase the volume of water in the Amur’s main channel to dilute the chemicals.

Meanwhile, Chinese authorities were investigating the death of Jilin Vice Mayor Wang, who had told reporters that the chemical plant explosion in the city of Jilin would cause no pollution.

“The exact reasons are unclear. The investigation has not reached a conclusion,” a spokeswoman for the Jilin province government told Hong Kong Cable TV.

The government didn’t announce the Songhua had been poisoned until 10 days later on November 23 – hours after the major city of Harbin was forced to shut down running water to 3.8 million people.

During a visit to Harbin, Premier Wen Jiabao promised to investigate the disaster, but didn’t mention the failure to inform the public.

An environmental official has complained that by failing to report the spill promptly, local authorities wrecked China’s best chance of minimising the damage.