Water in Chinese city declared safe; residents wary

HARBIN, China – Officials today said this city's water was again safe to drink after being shut down for five days because of a toxic spill in a nearby river, but residents remained wary about taking their first sips.

Running water was turned back on in Harbin, the capital of northeastern Heilongjiang province, on Sunday after supplies were shut down for 3.8 million people following a Nov. 13 explosion at a nearby chemical plant that spewed toxins in the Songhua River.

Officials initially warned that the water wasn't immediately safe to drink after lying in underground pipes for five days.

"Harbin's water is now safe to use and drink," Xiu Tinggong, vice director of the city's health inspection bureau, said on local television today. "Everybody can rest assured that the water is safe."

But many residents said they'd wait to see if it was safe before drinking it.

"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."

At the Jinshan Restaurant, where cooks busily stuffed and wrapped meat and vegetable dumplings, bottled water was being used for steaming.

"It's coming out, but we don't dare use it," said chef Jin Zhonghua. Jin said he lined up each morning before 9:00 a.m. to fill bottles from a water truck.

Food safety officials were quoted in official media as pledging to keep fish and other aquatic products from the Songhua River off the market. Beverage makers using water from the Songhua would also face stepped up inspections for an indefinite period, the report said.

Harbin's Education Bureau instructed schools to buy "quality water" for their students or have them bring their own bottled water from home when classes resume Wednesday after a weeklong break, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Even as water was deemed safe in Harbin, supplies to more communities along the river were cut off as the 50-mile-long stretch of cancer-causing benzene moved its way downstream toward Russia.

On Monday, 10,000 people downstream in Yilan County were without water service, China Central Television reported.

The Nov. 13 explosion upstream in the city of Jilin killed five people and spewed about 100 tons of benzene into the river, authorities have said.

In Harbin, the ice-capped Songhua River showed no sign today of the tons of benzene and related chemicals that had recently flowed through.

A kite-seller named Wu De shrugged off the pollution scare, saying that it was a "small thing" that hadn't impacted his life at all. "When the pollution passed, no one could tell," he said. "There was no smell."

But the spill created a political disaster for President Hu Jintao, who has promised greater government accountability in the face of endemic corruption and recurrent public health scares like bird flu.

Hu's government issued embarrassing apologies to China's public and to Russia, where the nation's emergency agency said Monday it was preparing to switch off running water and airlift activated carbon for use in water treatment facilities to help absorb the spill.

The Songhua River flows into the larger Heilong River, which is called the Amur in Russia.

Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said the pollutants could affect 70 Russian cities and villages with a total of over 1 million residents along the Amur river, including Khabarovsk, a city of 580,000.

Officials said the benzene spill was expected to reach Khabarovsk around Dec. 10-12 — or sooner.

China's Foreign Ministry said Beijing would do what it could to prevent the incident from harming bilateral ties.

"We will go all-out in reducing the possibility of harm from the Songhua River to the Russian side," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said at a regular briefing. "Both sides don't wish for this incident to harm our relations."