CHINA: As millions of residents in the Chinese city of Harbin suffered a third day without running water, the news of the 80km slick of toxic water slowly chugging along the near-frozen Songhua River has set nerves jangling right across the country.
Nearly three-quarters of China's rivers are polluted to varying degrees, but the sheer scale of the poisoning of the Songhua in the northeast has led to widescale fear and paranoia in China.
In Chongqing, a municipality in the southwestern province of Sichuan which has a population of 32 million people, an explosion at a chemical plant this week forced the evacuation of 6,000 riverside residents amid fears of benzene contamination, according to local media.
Even in Chongqing, an area notorious for its pollution, schools were shut and environmental protection officials went from house to house warning people not to drink the water.
In Harbin, local officials said they expected the slick of toxic water to flow past Harbin, a city of nine million and the capital of Heilongjiang province, by today.
They had stockpiled antidotes to benzene poisoning in the hospitals and by and large the situation on the street was normal.
The city's water company turned off the taps at midnight on Tuesday, and residents have been getting by on stockpiled reserves and bottled water.
The slick came after around 100 tonnes of benzene and other related toxins were released into the river following the explosion 12 days ago at the Jilin Petrochemical Company.
China's State Environmental Protection Administration has called for the plant to be held responsible for the blast.
The Russian environmental protection agency is also worried about the effects on drinking water in its Khabarovsk region, which the Songhua enters several hundred kilometres downstream from Harbin.
The Russians said China would have to be sued in international courts over the pollution.
The Songhua incident is the latest environmental catastrophe in China, where the downside of strong economic growth is terrible pollution.
At a conference in eastern Jiangxi province this week, experts said 70 per cent of China's rivers were contaminated.
The spill also highlights the precarious state of China's water supply system, where the country is trying to provide water to 1.3 billion people with increasingly scarce supplies. As premier Wen Jiabao told a state council meeting: "Our country's environmental situation remains grim."