Word: harbin
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...reason that officials in northeastern China decided not to announce that a 50-mile slick of toxic benzene was headed downriver toward the city of Harbin earlier this month was their fear of damaging tourism and investment in the region, sources tell TIME. Instead, as the potentially lethal spill approached the metropolis of 10 million people, the city said in an online statement that the entire water supply was being shut down for "water main maintenance and repair...
...spill had occurred on Nov. 13 when an explosion at a state-owned chemical factory in the province of Jilin released huge amounts of benzene into the Songhua river. But for the next nine days the government balked at telling citizens of Harbin, in the neighboring province of Heilongjiang, about the approaching pollutants, despite the fact that the river is the source of drinking water for the center of the city. The crucial decision to keep the spill secret was explained to provincial officials by Heilongjiang governor Zhang Zuoji at an internal meeting in Harbin's Peace Village Hotel...
...quandary. "On the one hand, people have the right to know. The responsibility of government is to be open and transparent," he said. "On the other hand, investment in Heilongjiang province is at a critical moment. The travel season is nearly upon us, especially the ice festival." Harbin's annual ice festival draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to view massive sculptures carved from blocks of ice taken from the Songhua...
...With the shutoff looming, he explained, Harbin city officials knew they had to say something. So, Zhang concluded, "Harbin created an explanation. It could only say that it was conducting maintenance on the water main." Zhang decided a misleading statement was better than no statement...
...said he received "a memorandum" from Beijing around midnight on Nov. 21, but didn't reveal the contents. He told officials to be ready for a disaster on the scale of an earthquake or a bird flu outbreak. At 2 a.m. on Nov. 22-presumably with Beijing's permission-Harbin put out a second statement alerting the population to the water stoppage. This time, the statement acknowledged that the chemical-plant explosion had "perhaps polluted the water" in the Songhua. This announcement seemed to calm residents, as did efficient logistics that ensured access to plenty of clean drinking water trucked...