Another environmental disaster on Chinese river

China’s southern business capital of Guangzhou, just north of Hong Kong, was rushing today to safeguard its water supply as a toxic spill from a smelter flowed toward the city of seven million people, state media said.

It was China’s second environmental disaster in a month and came as authorities were trying to minimise the impact of a chemical spill on a north-eastern river that disrupted water supplies to millions of people in China and has flowed into Russia.

Guangzhou and the nearby manufacturing centre of Foshan were ordered to “start emergency plans to ensure safe drinking water supplies to their residents,” the official Xinhua News Agency said. The report didn’t say what the cities were told to do.

The area is one of China’s most densely populated and is a centre for the factories that supply its booming export industries.

The government didn’t say whether Guangzhou would shut down running water or how many people might be affected.

Upstream, running water in the city of Shaoguan was shut down for about eight hours on Tuesday after the government said a smelter dumped toxic chemicals into the Bei River, pushing up cadmium levels to 10 times safe levels.

The Bei flows into the Pearl River, which passes through Guangzhou and empties into the South China Sea west of Hong Kong.

The disaster came a month after a chemical plant explosion in China’s northeast spewed 100 tons of benzene and other toxins into the Songhua River, forcing the major city of Harbin to shut down running water.

In Russia, authorities said the toxic slick could reach Khabarovsk, a city of 580,000 people, as early as Thursday. The city already has shut down running water in some areas as a precaution and warned all residents not to drink tap water.

The twin disasters highlighted China’s chronic environmental problems and the precarious state of its scarce water supplies.

China has suffered a series of such disasters, from toxic spills in rivers to the release of chlorine and other poison gases. Accidents often are blamed on lack of required safety equipment or officials’ refusal to enforce environmental rules that might hurt local businesses.

The government says China’s major rivers are badly polluted with such industrial chemicals. It says millions of people live in areas without adequate supplies of clean drinking water.

On the Bei River, the government has set up 20 stations to monitor water quality, Xinhua said.

Officials in Yingde were dumping water from a suburban reservoir into the river to dilute the toxins and were building a pipe from the reservoir to bring clean water into the city, Xinhua said.