Poisoned Water in Harbin, China - Follow-up to Yesterday's Post

Sailor Fred sent me two disturbing links to pages about an industrial accident that poisoned the water in Harbin, China, the city whose website I blogged about yesterday. As he points out there is nothing about it on their site.

Benzene appears to be the primary pollutant, with the slick expanding from 80 kilometers. The affected river crosses the border into Russia and there was controversy because it appears as though China tried to hide the accident from Russia for a number of days.

Harbin holds nearly four million people who had very little notice that the water was going to be shut off for four days. There was some panic but it appears as though things were pretty well under control.

It's all extremely depressing from an ecological view and I wonder if the ice and snow being used for sculpture for the ice and snow festival going on right now is contaminated. How awful it would be to go another country to compete and be poisoned.

And of course all of this just proves once again that James Macdonald is right, we need to be prepared for an emergency all the time. We should have water stockpiled around the house. I try to keep at least seven gallons of bottled water although that would go rather quickly. Still it's a start.