China: Water In City Safe To Drink

Five Days After Supplies Shut Down To 3.8M, Water Safe In Harbin

(AP)  Water tainted by a toxic chemical spill upstream from this northern Chinese city was declared safe for drinking on Tuesday, five days after supplies to 3.8 million people were shut down.

The spill was a political disaster for President Hu Jintao's government and cast a harsh light on the environmental costs of China's breakneck development, prompting Hu's government to apologize to China's public and to Russia, where a border city downstream is bracing for the arrival of the 50-mile-long benzene slick.

"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. "Everybody can rest assured that the water is safe."

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

Officials warned then that the water was not immediately safe to drink after lying in underground pipes for five days.

Beijing has offered no estimates on how many people rely on the Songhua for drinking water.

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

State media have accused officials of lying about and trying to conceal the spill — the result of a Nov. 13 chemical plant blast in Jilin, a city upstream from Harbin, that killed five people and forced 10,000 more to flee their homes.

But on Monday, media coverage was effusively upbeat, with newspaper photos showing smiling children in Harbin running their taps and water surging through treatment plants.

"We won!" said a headline in the newspaper Life News below a photo of the provincial governor drinking a glass of boiled tap water on Sunday.