China works to keep toxic slick from Russian city

Chinese workers are labouring “around the clock” on a temporary dam project to block pollutants from reaching a major Russian city, a Chinese official said today.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said the workers were sparing no effort to construct the dam in a waterway in the country’s north-east to mitigate the effects of a river-borne toxic spill flowing toward Khabarovsk, a Russian city of 480,000.

Work on the project began on December 16, a month after a chemical plant explosion in the Chinese city of Jilin unleashed a toxic slick that has already disrupted water supplies to millions of Chinese people and strained Beijing’s ties with Moscow.