Lax enforcement allows toxic sludge to overrun Chinese village

Here's China's environmental situation in a nutshell: In 2004, after a toxic spill into the Yellow River, two Chinese paper mills were fined $300,000 and ordered to install water-recycling and treatment equipment. They didn't. Instead, city officials built temporary wastewater containment pools beside the river. An environmental official ordered the city to shut down the factories if they continued to violate water-emission requirements. The factories continued; the city did nothing. In April 2006, a storm threatened to push wastewater from the pools into the river; fearing their refusal to comply with earlier orders would be exposed, officials diverted the wastewater into a three-mile strip beside the river, where several small villages stood. Farmers in the village of Sugai tried to build a dike, but the water was too high; liquid sludge sucked 57 homes into a polluted black lake. Three months later, the village remained uninhabitable, former residents had rashes, and the farmland was unworkable. Officials have declined to comment. Wouldn't you?

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China plans massive diversion of Tibetan river water

The Chinese never met a problem they couldn't solve with a few billion dollars and a massive engineering project out of scale with anything ever attempted before by humanity. The latest is a $37 billion undertaking which would divert water from rivers in the high reaches of Tibet -- which, when you think about it, don't really need all that water anyway -- through an elaborate, 190-mile series of canals and tunnels to the western reaches of the over-tapped Yellow River, which feeds the water-parched northern regions of China. The diversion would initially carry about 1 trillion gallons a year, rising to 4.5 trillion gallons over time. Construction could start as soon as 2010. The technical challenges are formidable: for one, the proposed route would divert water from an altitude of 13,600 feet, where it's usually frozen. Much of Tibet's water comes from glaciers that are in the midst of melting, so, as Tibet expert Tashi Tsering understates it, "This project is definitely not meant to develop Tibet."

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China faces two more toxic river crises

Two new toxic spills have hit rivers in central China. Last week, cadmium seeped out of silt dredged in a cleanup effort on the industrialized Xiangjiang River, contaminating a 60-odd mile stretch of the waterway, and a broken pipe at a power plant dumped six tons of diesel fuel into a tributary of the Yellow River. Chinese officials are downplaying both incidents, saying that they're using chemicals to neutralize the spills, and that drinking water supplies are safe. But with some 70 percent of China's rivers polluted, more and more citizens are feeling that the country is paying too heavy an environmental price for its economic boom. "Some local authorities only pay attention to the environment when problems arise," says local legislator Wang Guoxiang, "and sometimes then they still respond carelessly." China has meanwhile announced that it will spend more than $3 billion over five years to clean up November's massive benzene spill on the Songhua River.

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