Part of China’s Yellow River turns red
23 October 2006
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A half-mile section of China’s Yellow River turned “red and smelly” after an unknown discharge was poured into it from a sewage pipe, state media said Monday.
The incident in Lanzhou, a city of 2 million people in western Gansu province, follows a string of industrial accidents that have poisoned major rivers in China over the last year, forcing several cities to shut down their water systems.
It wasn’t immediately clear what was tainting the section of the Yellow River, which is a drinking water source for millions. Environmental protection officials took samples and were trying to determine whether the sewage was toxic, the official Xinhua news agency said.
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China’s cities are among the world’s smoggiest, and the government says its major rivers, canals and lakes are badly polluted by industrial, agricultural and household pollution.
Environmental protection has taken on new urgency for Chinese leaders following a November 2005 chemical spill in the Songhua River in northeastern China which forced the city of Harbin to shut down its water supply for days and sent toxins flowing into Russia.
And an arsenic pollution case in Hunan province last month cut water supplies to 80,000 people.
Last week, state media cited China’s State Oceanic Administration as saying the Bohai Sea, the body of water between China and the Korean peninsula, was so polluted it would “die†within 10 years.
Hundreds of millions of people live without adequate supplies of clean drinking water. Throughout the country, protests have erupted over complaints by farmers that uncontrolled discharges by factories are ruining crops and poisoning water supplies.
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Red-tainted liquid pours out of a sewage pipe Monday and into China’s Yellow River in Lanzhou.
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