Clear need to answer questions after pollution
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E-mail China Daily, February 7, 2012
Huang Youping has depended on the Longjiang River to earn a living for more than 20 years. But on Jan 7 the stock in his fish farm floated to the surface. "At first I thought it was just bad luck."
![Clockwise from top: Workers at Jinhe Mining build a concrete channel from an area where mineral residue has been dumped to a new reclamation plant. These cadmium bricks at Jinhe weigh a ton. Farmers harvest sugar cane adjacent to Lalang hydroelectric station. Cadmium pollution in the river killed thousands of kilograms of fish farmed nearby. [China Daily]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20120207/0014222d9850109abedb08.jpg "Clockwise from top: Workers at Jinhe Mining build a concrete channel from an area where mineral residue has been dumped to a new reclamation plant. These cadmium bricks at Jinhe weigh a ton. Farmers harvest sugar cane adjacent to Lalang hydroelectric station. Cadmium pollution in the river killed thousands of kilograms of fish farmed nearby. [China Daily]") |
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Clockwise from top: Workers at Jinhe Mining build a concrete channel from an area where mineral residue has been dumped to a new reclamation plant. These cadmium bricks at Jinhe weigh a ton. Farmers harvest sugar cane adjacent to Lalang hydroelectric station. Cadmium pollution in the river killed thousands of kilograms of fish farmed nearby. [China Daily] |
Then his neighbors reported that their fish stocks were also dead. Huang realized that something must be wrong with the water.
Huang, 42, lives in Desheng town, Yizhou city, in South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region. On Jan 15 the authorities told Huang and others that tests showed cadmium contamination. Cadmium is a carcinogenic heavy metal used in manufacturing batteries and paints and if ingested by humans can be fatal. It softens bones and causes kidney failure.
There is no known medical cure for cadmium poisoning.
Experts estimate that 20 tons of cadmium leaked into the Longjiang, polluting up to 300 kilometers of the river. Its peak concentration was 80 times the allowable limit.
Downstream, Liuzhou city scrambled to neutralize the chemical spill and its threat to tap water for more than 3.5 million people.
Initial investigations show that lack of pollution treatment, illegal discharging of toxic sewage, and poor supervision by local authorities are causes of the chemical spill.
Nine people have been detained on suspicion they were responsible for the contamination, and local authorities say the river water is now safe. But people who live next to the river and make their livings from it aren't sure.
Mining firm culprit
Yizhou, the site of the Lalang hydroelectric station, is 55 km downstream from where the Jincheng and Longjiang rivers join at Hechi city. A task force from the city's environmental authority traced the distance.
![A villager checks stocks in his fish farm in Yizhou, South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, on Wednesday. Cadmium leaked from a factory into the Longjiang River where his fish farm is located. [China Daily]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20120207/0014222d9850109abf2b0d.jpg "A villager checks stocks in his fish farm in Yizhou, South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, on Wednesday. Cadmium leaked from a factory into the Longjiang River where his fish farm is located. [China Daily]") |
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A villager checks stocks in his fish farm in Yizhou, South China's Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, on Wednesday. Cadmium leaked from a factory into the Longjiang River where his fish farm is located. [China Daily] |
The authority reported that it examined 145 factories and found that 11 did not meet standards for environmental protection. Of the 11, seven were held responsible for the cadmium pollution and were urged to make corrections.
Jinhe Mining, a State-owned enterprise in Hechi, is one of them.
The company, founded nearly a half-century ago as an ordnance factory, set a goal in 2010 to maintain revenue at 1.1 billion yuan with gross profit of more than 80 million yuan ($174.4 million and $12.7 million). The company said it reclaimed 300 tons of cadmium in 2011.
Jinhe's production zone is embraced on three sides by hills. At the end of a narrow swale, mineral waste residue is scattered throughout a 10,000-square-meter area. The task force said the company intentionally dumped the residue there without any processing for environmental protection, and excessive cadmium consequently leaked into groundwater.
The local government shut down the factory on Jan 18, but the air in the production zone remains smoggy. The hillsides are bare, except for a handful of green plants.
A sign nearby indicates that the residue has been dumped there since June.
When asked whether it might be a source of the river's pollution, Zeng Xinyu, the factory's production director, told China Daily: "I'm not clear."
Opaque plastic sheeting, held down by steel bars, now covers the residue and keeps out rain, which would cause the minerals to leach out.
Beside it, a dozen workers are building a concrete channel to connect the dump with a recently established plant to reclaim the waste. "The plant will be activated in four months," Zeng said. "We'll do our best to carry out the government's orders."
Hidden operation
Another of the responsible factories, Hongquan Lithopone Materials Plant in Hechi, about 14.5 km upstream of Lalang hydropower station, was accused of illegal production and dumping waste directly into the river.
Local authorities approved the plant in 2007 to produce lithopone, a widely used white paint pigment, and zinc sulfide. However, it has been producing the metal indium, outside its business scope, since December 2009.
Guangxi's environmental protection bureau said the company made careful arrangements to hide its illegal operation: The key production unit is locked down so no outsiders can approach. The products are packed in bags without clear labels. Except for key management and technical staff, most workers at the plant don't know what they are actually producing.
Worse, the bureau said, the company has no pollution treatment facilities. All sewage, with a high concentration of heavy metals, is stored temporarily in 10 tanks. The waste contains highly toxic cadmium, arsenic and zinc, and it is discharged into nearby underground caves through well-covered channels.
The names of the five other responsible operations were not disclosed. Nine executives at Jinhe and Hongquan have been detained.
But the environmental authorities did not say what triggered the major chemical spill this time. The illegal dumping of wastes at the two plants has been going on for quite a while.
Fishermen's loss
The chemical spill, one of the worst in the country, took heavy tolls on local fishermen.
Huang Youping started to invest in fish farming in 2010 after years of fishing in the Longjiang, like others who live along the riverbank.
"My fish are about 7 to 10 cm long, smaller and younger than others' fish," he said. That's why the nightmare - he lost 5,000 fish - hit him earlier than his peers.
"The incident has already caused me the loss of some 40,000 yuan ($6,300)," he said. "I have a family with a dozen mouths to feed, and besides, I must pay high school tuition fees for my two sons."
His neighbor, Huang Jianping, said he lost everything. "In previous years, I only maintained hundreds of fish in the net, but I decided to speculate and raise the number to several thousand last year," he said. "The decision wiped me out."
Yizhou has prohibited all fishing activities and the sale of fish farmed in the tainted river.
According to Xinhua News Agency, fish farms from Liujiang and Liucheng, two downstream counties right before the Longjiang joins the Liujiang River, have banned selling fish from the river.
"It makes us suddenly have nothing to do but loiter around," Huang Chaoxin, 35, said as he pointed at the government notice pasted in his neighborhood in Desheng, Yizhou.
He, Huang Jianping and Huang Youping were mobilized to bury a batch of floating dead fish. "We had to dig a coffin shape in the ground to bury thousands of fish," said Huang Jianqiang, 46. "We dug it 2 meters deep, as it was far more stinky than people can stand."
Even more fish were floating under the nearly frozen surface, but the fishermen said they had done enough.
Huang Chaoxin said the six fishing families in his group expect a collective loss of 400,000 yuan.
Authorities in Hechi, where the sources of cadmium contamination were found, issued a range of figures last week. They said more than 40,000 kilograms of fish were found dead by Thursday, and that more than 230 households living by the river have been affected.
Is it safe?
Huang Chaoxin said that in front of his home, the Longjiang is showing black mixed with the yellow mud of the river, which happens every December. "The turbid color in water normally lasts for two months."
Local government has said the water near Lalang station, where Huang lives, is clear of the heavy-metal poison, but all the sediment in the water concerns him. "We know our tap water is from the turbid river, but there's nothing we can do."
Meanwhile, farmer Xie Linjun, 27, who lives nearby, said his crops along the riverbank are growing normally. "We cannot go fishing in our spare time as we did in normal years, but the crops are not affected" by the tainted river.
Lack of transparency
The Longjiang cadmium spill is yet another in a string of major heavy-metal pollution incidents.
Statistics from the Ministry of Environmental Protection show there have been more than 30 serious cases of heavy metal pollution by chemical, photovoltaic, pharmaceutical and IT companies in about 10 provinces since 2009.
In early 2011, the ministry released a five-year blueprint to target heavy-metal pollution, including by arsenic, lead, mercury, chromium and cadmium. But details of the blueprint have not been published.
Environmentalists say that without making pollution information available to the public, the effectiveness of pollution control efforts can only be limited.
"The environmental ministry had called for a 'blanket inspection' of heavy metal pollution facilities. This means, in theory, local governments should already have an inventory of local industrial facilities that release heavy metals, with basic information on who is discharging what," said Ma Tianjie, toxic campaign head with Greenpeace East Asia.
"With such information in hand, a local government should be able to quickly pinpoint a source of pollution when it sees an unusual increase in the monitoring data of certain pollutants. This apparently did not happen in the case in Guangxi," he said.
Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, said the incident should be a wakeup call for Hechi city, which is benefiting from its booming mining and smelting industries.
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