UN offers to help China with toxic river incident
The United Nations has offered to help China deal with a massive chemical spill on a river that flows into Russia, but the Chinese side has yet to respond with information about the disaster, an official said today.
“We need basic, official information from the Chinese side, which we do not have,” said Vladimir Sakharov, of the United Nations Environment Program.
Chinese authorities estimate that some 100 tons of benzene and nitro-benzene were released into the Songhua River in the north-east following a November 13 chemical plant explosion in Jilin province.
The pollutants were expected to flow downstream to Russia within a few weeks.
Sakharov said that on Wednesday the UN told the Russian and Chinese governments that they were willing to do a “neutral, independent, professional assessment” of the spill, but neither government has responded.
He said that in previous environmental disasters that spread across borders, such assessments had been welcomed.
