Chemical Spill Diluted with Sewage
// Ecological threat The poisonous chemical spill that occurred after an accident in a Chinese chemical plant on November 14 will reach Khabarovsk on the Amur River tomorrow. At a meeting held by presidential representative for the Far Eastern Federal District Kamil Iskhakov, it was revealed that ammiac, nitrites, nitrates and toluole were released into the water along with the benzene and nitrobenzene already known. In the worst case scenario, Khabarovsk will be without hot water for a week and fishing will be prohibited in the river for the next five years.
According to Lieut. Gen. Viktor Kapkanshchikov, head of the Far Eastern Regional Center of the Emergencies Ministry, the highest levels of poisonous substances in the Amur were recorded on Sunday at the village of Nizhneleninskoe, on the right bank of the river. There the level of nitrobenzene exceeded permissible concentrations by 1.05 times. That level later dropped to 0.72 times the permissible concentration. Kapkanshchikov said that a dam was being built to prevent the chemicals from entering the reservoirs that supply water to the villages of Bychikha, Kazakevichevo and Krasnaya Rechka, outside Khabarovsk.
Governor Viktor Ishaev has long been disturbed by the lack of information from the Chinese on the chemicals involved in the spill. He obtained information that the Chinese had released agricultural waste water into the Sungari River, a tributary of the Amur, to dilute the chemicals. The chemical makeup of the waste water is unknown, however. Samples taken from the Amur now contain a variety of poisonous substances in addition to the benzene and nitrobenzene acknowledged by the Chinese to have been released. “Maybe we know more than we are saying,” Ishaev noted. “In China, 80 percent of the water cannot be used even for industry. We were lucky that we had time to prepare.”
There are no plans yet to turn the city's water off. If the concentration of chemicals at Nizhnespasskoe, a village 70 km. upstream from Khabarovsk, exceeds norms by more than 100 percent, officials will warn the residents of the city that they have two days to stockpile water, then cold water will be turned off for three to five days and hot water for a week. Heating will not be affected. Fishing is already prohibited for a year, and the governor fears that that ban will have to be extended to five years.
