An environmentalist warned that toxins from an industrial spill will stay locked in river ice until winter breaks next year, but officials who restored water supplies to Harbin City insist the danger it posed to residents is ended.
Running water was turned back on in Harbin, the capital of northeastern Heilongjiang Province, on Sunday after supplies were switched off for five days because of the Nov. 13 explosion that spewed chemicals -- including cancer-causing benzene -- into the Songhua River.
The vice director of Harbin's health inspection bureau, Xiu Tinggong, said on Tuesday the water was safe to use and drink. Officials had earlier expressed concern that water left in the city's underground pipes for five days may not be safe.
"Everybody can rest assured that the water is safe," Xiu said on local television.
Many residents were still wary.
"We still can't be sure that it's safe," said bank worker Sun Ning as she loaded a shopping cart with bottled water for her household. "It's not that we don't trust the government, but we are still not totally at ease."
Concerns also were high in the Russian city of Khabarovsk, where the toxic soup from Harbin was headed after flowing into the larger Heilong River, called the Amur in Russian. Chinese officials have said the spill was expected to reach Khabarovsk around Dec. 10-12 -- or sooner.
A top Russian environmental official tried to reassure the population on Tuesday by drinking a glass of water on television.
But the World Wide Fund for Nature said the river faced "ecological catastrophe" from the 80km-long slick of chemicals floating toward the Russian border from China.
Meanwhile, Beijing has invited experts from the UN to assess the chemical spill.
The team of four will come from several UN agencies, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and UN Development Program, and will probably begin testing water along the Songhua River in the next few days, said Roy Wadia, a WHO spokesman in Beijing.
The international experts will assess the continued presence and effects of the pollutants that poured into the river.
"They will provide technical expertise in the areas of water contamination, chemical contamination, and the public health implications of such an incident," Wadia said yesterday.
The team will include Russian experts, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS