MOSCOW, December 1 (RIA Novosti) - Tests of the Amur River near Khabarovsk in Russia's Far East have shown the level of Benzene pollution to be negligible following a chemical spill in the Songhua River, an Amur tributary in China, the Russian Emergencies Ministry said Thursday.
The toxic slick was the result of an explosion at a Chinese petrochemicals plant November 13, which caused about 100 metric tons of benzene to be released into the river.
The ministry's statement read as follows: "In samples from a point in the river with weak water exchange, a negligible increase in the contamination level of benzene group substances was observed. In samples taken from the middle of the river and before the dam, on the river bed, no excess of benzene or other harmful chemical substances was found."
The samples, taken near Khabarovsk by specialists from the Far East department of Russia's hydrometeorological agency, were analyzed at the Tectonics and Geophysics Laboratory of the Russian Academy of Science.
Analyses showed that the samples did not reveal pollution in the part of the river near Khabarovsk nor in the Amur as a whole but "only reflect[ed] the state of a riverbank site of dam construction and operation of heavy engineering-construction equipment," the statement said.
However, Oleg Mitvol, the deputy chairman of the Federal Service for the Oversight of Natural Resources, said Wednesday at a news conference, "The benzene concentration already exceeds maximally acceptable levels six- to eightfold."
Mitvol, whose team of specialists took samples from the same point in the river as the hydrometeorological agency, said that the benzene slick would reach Khabarovsk in three or four days.
The Russian Natural Resources Ministry said Thursday that as of November 30, the concentration of nitrobenzene at a point in the Songhua 200 kilometers downriver from the Chinese city of Harbin, half way between Harbin and the Russian border, exceeded the maximum permissible concentration by 26 times.
The spill now has a length of about 110 kilometers (68 miles), the ministry said.
