| China's "sorrow" river flows red from pollution |
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Tue Nov 21, 2006 11:27pm ET BEIJING (Reuters) - A stretch of China's Yellow River, the country's second longest, has turned red from pollution for the second time in a month, local media reported on Wednesday.
A foul-smelling kilometer-long plume near the Yellow River Children's Park in Lanzhou, capital of China's northwestern Gansu province, was "very possibly" caused by discharge from a plant providing hot water to heat the city's buildings, the Beijing News reported, citing a city environmental protection official.
The official said the facility had added a dye called rose essence to its water to prevent people from siphoning water from the pipes, the paper said.The exact nature and origin of the discharge was still under investigation, environment officials said.A similar spill occurred in the same part of the river, Xinhua reported, but officials had not determined its cause.The latest spill follows a report on Wednesday from China's environment watchdog, the State Environmental Protection Agency, saying that tributaries feeding the Yellow River are seriously polluted.In July, Beijing planners touted a scheme to divert water from the Yellow River as an emergency source of drinking water for the 2.5 million extra people expected to descend on the capital during the 2008 Olympic games, but environmental officials have questioned the efficacy of the scheme, given vast stretches are so polluted the water is unfit for drinking or swimming.Once known as "China's sorrow" for its catastrophic flooding, the Yellow River, which supplies water to more than 150 million people and irrigates 15 percent of the country's farmland, is also drying up.The depth of the river's upper reaches have fallen to record lows because of hot weather and scant rainfall, state media reported earlier in thehttp://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-11-22T042718Z_01_PEK138039_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-CHINA-YELLOW-RIVER.xml
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