Quake hits beleaguered China struggling to stem chemical accident

BEIJING - sub-zero temperatures that froze their hands, soldiers and workers in Harbin, north-east China, yesterday hacked at the ice on the Songhua river with axes and crowbars in a desperate attempt to speed the flow of waters poisoned by a chemical plant explosion.

Teams struggled round the clock in the city of nine million in order to meet a government deadline to restore clean water to the city by today.

About 3.8 million local residents have been without any running water for four days, after an explosion at a chemical plant in neighbouring Jilin province sent 100 tons of toxic benzene tipping into the Songhua, which is Harbin's main source of drinking water.

But the early onset of winter has slowed the flow of the 50- mile stretch of contaminated water through the region, forcing workers to resort to axes to break the ice and ease the flow.

With the icy water moving at only one mile an hour, the poison is not expected to pass Harbin until early today, as a result of which the water supply is not likely to return to the city until late tonight, or tomorrow.

The poisoning of the Songhua is not the only environmental disaster to hit China.

In the eastern province of Jiangxi, an earthquake yesterday killed 14 people and injured nearly 400.

The quake, which measured 5.7 on the Richter scale, struck at 8.49am and was followed by two aftershocks, damaged 130,000 homes and forced the evacuation of 420,000 people, according to initial reports.

While no one was likely to hold Chinese officialdom to account for the quake, public reaction has been angrier over the longest, biggest water stoppage in Chinese history,Although China's Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, visited Harbin yesterday in an effort to reassure residents that the situation was under control, the usually docile media have remained outspoken in their condemnation of local officials who at first tried to cover up news of the toxic leak.

Even the official Xinhua news agency admonished the authorities.

"Telling the truth is a precondition for handling a public crisis," it said yesterday.

Some Harbin residents, facing a fourth day of queuing up with buckets and kettles to collect water from trucks, threatened to sue local officials.

A restaurant owner named Ding Ning has already sued the Jilin Petrochemical Company, whose 101 Chemical Plant was responsible for the benzene leak.

Mr Ding said he wanted a symbolic 15 yuan ($2.50) in compensation, as this was the amount he had spent on bottled water since the water supply was turned off.

"Whoever brought risk to everyone's life should take the blame," Mr Ding told Xinhua.

The residents of Harbin are not the only ones up in arms.

With the Russian media describing the toxic leak as an "ecological catastrophe", Beijing also faces a potentially huge compensation claim from Russia.

Once the Songhua flows past Harbin it melds into the Amur River, which flows in turn into the Khabarovsk region in Russia's far east.

On Thursday, China made the first move to defuse Russian concerns by setting up a hotline to share information about the spill.

"China is very concerned about the possible hazards to Russia," a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, Liu Jianchao, said.

But a hotline may not be enough.

China and Russia signed agreements in 1994 and 2004 to safeguard fish stocks in the Amur and Songhua and to ensure the ecological safety of both rivers.

Those agreements now seem in tatters and they could provide Russia with a legal basis to sue the Chinese for compensation and clean-up costs.

With the polluted stretch of the Songhua expected to flow into Russia in the next two weeks, the city of Khabarovsk, with 1.5 million residents, has already made plans to switch off drinking fountains several days before the spill crosses the border.

The authorities have also ordered the distribution of free bottled water.

Fears were also mounting for the future state of the river's fish.

"The fish may become poisonous so a ban is probably needed on the consumption of fish from the Amur," Alexei Kokorin, the Russian co-ordinator for the World Wildlife Fund, said.

- INDEPENDENT