Authorities in Foshan city, an industrial part of export-
dependent Guangdong province close to Hong Kong, discovered the problem on
Saturday and immediately stopped taking water from the stream, the official
Xinhua news agency reported.
"Initial investigations showed the aquatic farm ...
had discharged waste water into the stream," it said.
The part of the city affected has since taken measures to
make up for the lost supply, and as of Sunday the number of people facing
disruption had come down to around 1,000 people, Xinhua added.
Pollution, especially when it threatens relatively
prosperous urban citizens, is a growing source of concern for Chinese people
and has even sparked protests, a major worry for the stability-obsessed ruling
Communist Party.
In 2005, a chemical explosion sent an 80-km long benzene
slick flowing along the Songhua River, forcing tap water to be suspended in
cities in Northeast China and Russia in the dead of winter. The accident was
initially covered up.
In recent weeks, two water disasters have come to public
attention — waste from metal processing plants sent cadmium levels soaring in
the Longjiang river, which ultimately flows into the heavily populated Pearl
River Delta, and a South Korean chemicals barge sank in the Yangtze River,
releasing phenol that caused tap water to smell strange in the city of
Zhenjiang.
