HARBIN, China – It was dusk Friday when the trucks carrying clean water finally made it to Chengxiang Road. As word spread through the grimy apartment buildings, residents in heavy coats poured onto the street with plastic buckets, porcelain basins and steel pots.
After a third day without running water in Harbin, following an emergency shut-off caused by a massive chemical spill into the region’s main river, many in the line expressed relief that help had arrived. But they also shared their anger.
“All of these problems are caused by the government,” one man growled as he struggled to carry a huge red bucket of water back to his apartment. His wife cut him off as a local official walked over, loudly praising the ruling Communist Party.
Twelve days after an estimated 100 tons of benzene and other toxic compounds poured in the Songhua River following an explosion at a state-owned petrochemical plant, the party is struggling to contain a political crisis as much as an environmental one.
Chinese journalists succeeded in publishing a series of reports on Friday describing efforts by party officials to cover up the chemical spill. On Friday night, reporters received orders from the party’s central propaganda department to stop asking questions and go home. All state media were told to use the reports only of the official New China News Agency, the journalists said.
Meanwhile, the central government announced it was sending a team of high-level investigators to Harbin. The report suggested in unusually blunt terms that local officials would be disciplined. “Punishments of irresponsible acts are on the way,” it said.
The party’s moves to limit the political fallout came as a 50-mile-long slick of toxic water continued to flow through Harbin, a city of 3.8 million people in Heilongjiang province about 600 miles northeast of Beijing. The city said concentrations of benzene had fallen to safe levels, but amounts of a related toxic compound, nitrobenzene, remained more than three times above acceptable limits as of 6 a.m. today.
The spill occurred after an explosion Nov. 13 at the Jilin Petrochemical Co. that killed five workers and injured 70 more. The plant is about 165 miles upstream from Harbin in Jilin province.
Party officials at first denied the blast caused any pollution, and continued to repeat such statements as recently as Monday.
But in one of several tough reports on Friday, the state-run China Youth Daily quoted an unidentified city engineer in Jilin saying party officials there were told of the chemical spill within eight hours of the explosion. Citing another unnamed source, it also said the Jilin officials released water from a reservoir into the river in an attempt to dilute the spill without alerting the public.
It was not until Nov. 21, when they were confronted with tests showing pollution at more than 100 times acceptable levels, that Harbin officials decided to shut down the water supply.
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