Chinese residents line up to fill water containers from a tanker truck in Harbin, Heilongjiang province Nov. 28.

Water began running again for the city's 3.8 million inhabitants Nov. 27, ending a five-day shutdown caused by a chemical plant explosion. But officials warned that the water wasn't immediately safe to drink after lying in underground pipes, saying media bulletins would announce when the supply was clean enough first to bathe in and later to drink but not saying when that was expected to happen.

The Nov. 13 chemical plant explosion in Jilin, a city upstream, was a political disaster for the government of President Hu Jintao and cast a harsh light on the environmental costs of China's breakneck development.

Hu's government issued embarrassing apologies to China's public and to Russia, where a border city downstream was bracing for the arrival of the 80-km-long benzene slick. (Counting pollution's cost on Page 5)

The Japan Times Weekly: Dec. 3, 2005
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