Beijing scrambles over toxic spill
Top environmental official fired, more to go after 100 tons of cancer-causing chemicals spilled into drinking supplies
BEIJING — The long- term environmental impact of last month’s chemical explosion in northern China that left millions of people without safe drinking water remains to be seen. But the political fallout has begun.
Beijing sacked its top environmental official on Friday in an effort to show accountability for the mishandling of the crisis with more heads likely to roll, possibly including local party leaders in Jilin province where a petrochemical plant accident spilled 100 tons of benzene and other cancer-causing chemicals into the Songhua River.
Residents of Harbin, a city of 3.8 million people, were not informed about the contamination until 10 days after the accident. The 80kilometre-long toxic slick is still making its way downstream toward the Russian border, forcing more towns and villages along the way to shut off their taps and switch to bottled water.
Some observers say the Harbin water crisis illustrates the bigger problem of China’s bureaucratic paralysis during emergencies. “This is a system-wide failure,” said Jiang Wenran, Acting Director of the China Institute at the University of Alberta. “The system itself is not set up to respond quickly. At every level there was confusion and delay.”
Xie Zhenhua, chief of the State Environmental Protection Administration since 1993, took the fall partly because he sat at the top of the chain of command.
Shortly before Xie’s resignation was announced, his agency lashed out at Jilin officials for failing to report the disaster in a timely fashion. For about four days after the explosion on Nov. 13, the agency received no information on the accident, “losing the best opportunity [to control the pollution],” said Wang Yuqing, vice- minister of the administration, according to the official China Daily.
According to Jiang, a Harbin native who has done extensive research on the incident, authorities in Jilin and Heilongjiang where Harbin is located, reported to Beijing seeking directions on what to do next. The scale of the disaster was such that they had no authority to act independent of the central government.
“ When the responsibility reached them, [SEPA officials] were not able to make a quick decision,” said Jiang. “They were telling the Jilin and Heilongjiang officials to find some kind of excuses.”
A day before it would be too late to warn the public to prepare for the shut off of the city’s tap water supply, Harbin officials announced that they needed to do maintenance work on the pipes. What has been billed as a “well-intentioned lie,” actually helped set off panic, prompting skeptical residents to hoard bottled water and, in some cases, flee the city. The cover-up ended only after Premier Wen Jiabao intervened and said the public must be told the truth, according to Jiang. It remains unclear when Wen became aware of the contamination.
Even if Wen hadn’t stepped in, China’s environmental problems are increasingly hard to hide.
The Songhua River is an international river. It flows through two Chinese provinces, into the Heilong River on the Chinese side and becomes the Amur in Russia.
With a potential diplomatic fiasco on its hands, Beijing issued a rare apology to Moscow and offered assistance in monitoring the pollution and filtering the drinking water supply.
China had learned its lesson the hard way. Two years ago it came under heavy international criticism for denying the SARS outbreak until the virus had spread beyond its borders. To show it meant business the central government fired the health minister and the Beijing mayor.
The decision again to remove a high level official is another sign Beijing is trying to regain public trust. Los Angeles Times