CHINA: China has fired the head of its environment agency over the toxic spill that left Harbin city in the north-east without water last month. More heads are expected to roll over the way the pollution incident was handled.
The disaster was triggered by an explosion at a petro-chemical plant at Jilin on November 13th.
It led to an 80-km slick of toxic pollution on the Songhua river which left Harbin and other cities downstream without tap water for days. No one in Harbin, which has about 9 million residents, was told about the slick heading their way until the taps were shut off. The lack of information and swirl of rumour led to residents sleeping outdoors, fearful of earthquakes.
Xie Zhenhua, head of the State Environmental Protection Administration (Sepa), tendered his resignation but he had already effectively been removed by the all-powerful state council, which is China's cabinet.
In a broader political sense, the sacking can be seen as part of the drive by President Hu Jintao to improve official accountability among senior government officials. It is reminiscent of the way he sacked senior health and municipal officials for trying to conceal the Sars outbreak in 2003.
The state council blamed Sepa for negligence but for many people, it was a case of shooting the messenger; no one believed that the sacking would be the last.
Mr Xie does not have ministerial status, so in some ways his sacking is less significant than it might appear. It shows though that China is keen to be seen to be doing something about pollution, which is increasingly bringing it into conflict with its neighbours.
About 100 tonnes of cancer-causing benzene, which is used to make petrol, was pumped into the river from the plant, which is owned by PetroChina, one of China's biggest oil firms.
It has also strained ties with China's strategic partner Russia, a major source of oil and gas. The Songhua river flows into the Heilong river, which becomes the Amur in Russia; the spill was flowing towards Russian cities.
Sepa was furious at officials in Jilin for failing to report the disaster. The state-run China Daily quoted Wang Yuqing, vice minister of the environmental agency, as saying that Sepa was kept in the dark for four days after the blast.
Newspapers here have accused officials at PetroChina, particularly senior local officials in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, of trying to cover up the news in the week after the blast and causing serious delays in containing the water crisis.
China's environmental record is poor, as the burgeoning economy wreaks a heavy toll on its environment. According to a recent World Bank study, nearly a third of China is polluted by acid rain, 70 per cent of its rivers are polluted and 16 of the world's 20 most polluted cities are Chinese.