China’s Environmental Disasters on the Rise — Quietly
by ilene - July 30th, 2010 1:32 am
China’s Environmental Disasters on the Rise — Quietly
By Austin Ramzy / Beijing, courtesy of TIME
A massive explosion in a southern Chinese city is only the latest in a series of industrial accidents that have hit China in recent weeks. While the country’s economic boom has always been dogged by environmental and safety hazards, the frequency of disasters this summer has raised new questions about whether the country can maintain its pace of expansion without doing catastrophic harm to its people and the environment. "These accidents are happening all over China, and the scale … has become larger and larger," says Wen Bo, a senior fellow with the San Francisco–based NGO Pacific Environment. "You see something you have never seen before, and then you see it again on a larger and larger scale."
The July 28 explosion at a shuttered plastics factory in Nanjing rocked the surrounding neighborhood, killing at least 10 people and injuring another 300, according to state media reports. Investigators suspect the rupture of a propylene pipeline, possibly caused by workers who were dismantling the factory, triggered the midmorning blast. The explosion collapsed nearby structures, shattered windows in the surrounding area and sent columns of acrid black smoke into the air. "I heard a loud bang that lasted for about one second," said a teacher at the Nanjing Technical College of Special Education, which is about a kilometer northwest of the factory. "My first reaction was to run downstairs because I thought it was an earthquake … As soon as I got outside the building, I saw most of the windows on the first floor were shattered."
On the same day, thousands of barrels containing toxic industrial chemicals were spotted in the Songhua River in northeast China. Floodwaters had swept the containers from a nearby storage depot and into a tributary of the river, Jilin province environmental authorities reported. Some 7,000 barrels are estimated to have been lost in the river, including 3,000 that contained chemicals used in making synthetic rubber, among other applications. China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection said Thursday that "no abnormalities" had been detected in a test of the river’s waters.
Those disasters were preceded by a July 16 oil spill at the port city of Dalian in northeast China. Some 1,500 tons of crude spilled into the Yellow Sea when two pipelines belonging to the state-owned China National Petroleum…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.