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S. China cities to deal with possible water crisis
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2005-12-22 10:28
The southern Chinese cities of Guangzhou and Foshan were ordered Wednesday by
local provincial government to soon start emergency plans to ensure safe
drinking water supplies to their residents as a toxic click approaches.
The river pollution was caused by an excessive discharge of cadmium from a
state-owned smeltery in the Beijiang River, a major source of drinking water for
cities in the northern part of south China's Guangdong Province.
The local environmental protection departments found in the smeltery in
Guangdong's Shaoguan City that the excessive discharge of waste has made the
volume of cadmium in the river section of Shaoguan surge nearly 10 times above
the safety standard, "seriously affecting" the water safety in the river's lower
reaches.
The smeltery has halted operation and closed the waste water outlet blamed
for excessive discharge, according to the environment protection office of
Shaoguan City.
Local governments along the Beijiang River have set up 20 monitoring posts to
keep a close watch on the water quality.
The density of cadmium kept dropping after the local governments began
diluting the polluted water by increasing the discharge of the water reservoirs
at Beijiang's upper reaches, according to environmental protection experts.
Experts forecasted that the diluted water will likely not threaten the
drinking water source for the downstream cities of Foshan and Guangzhou.
Nevertheless, the two cities have been askedto start emergency plans to ensure
safe drinking water.
Zhang Lijun, deputy director of the State Environmental Protection
Administration, arrived Tuesday at Yingde, which is about 90 km south of
Shaoguan, with a group of 14 experts on environmental protection, city water
supplied, agriculture and health to deal with the possible water crisis.
The toxic click arrived at Yingde, a city of more than 100,000 urban
residents, Tuesday night.
Yingde has begun to build a 1.4-km-long water pipe linking with the supply
line of a reservoir in a suburb to send clean water directly to the urban
district.
A large quantity of water carriers, including 15 fire engines, have been used
to send drinking water to the urban district.
So far, local people's lives remains normal along the 470-km-long Beijiang
River, which runs from north to south into the Zhujiang (Pearl) River flowing
through Guangzhou, according to the provincial environmental protection
department.
Cadmium is a soft, bluish-white metallic element occurring primarily in zinc,
copper, and lead ores, that is easily cut with a knife and is used in
low-friction, fatigue-resistant alloys, solders, dental amalgams, nickel-cadmium
storage batteries, nuclear reactor shields, and in rustproof electroplating.
It is the second major water pollution incident in China in recent days.
A chemical plant blast on Nov. 13 in Jilin City of northeast China's Jilin
Province resulted in a serious leakage of poisonous substances of cancer-causing
benzene and nitrobenzene into the Songhua River, which forced a four-day water
cut-off to Harbin, capital of neighboring Heilongjiang Province.
Chinese workers successfully dammed a waterway in the Heilongjiang River
Wednesday morning before the chemical spill arriving at the Russian city
downstream.
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