In an incident echoing a near environmental disaster last November, Chinese media said Wednesday that on August 20 the Jilin chemical plant discharged untreated industrial waste containing highly toxic benzene derivatives into the Songhua River, a tributary of the Amur River, which passes through the Khabarovsk Territory in Russia. Local witnesses said a toxic slick, 5 kilometers (about 3.5 miles) long, was moving along the river.
"We asked China to provide official information on the scale of the accident, the size and the speed of the polluted slick and the toxic content of the spill as soon as possible," the ministry said in a statement.
The letter addressed to the Chinese authorities said the pollution of the Amur River threatened water supplies to over a million residents of regional center Khabarovsk and other towns along the lower course of the river.
Russian experts calculated that the toxic spill could reach Amur estuary as early as on September 3-4 and Khabarovsk on September 7-8.
A blast at the plant belonging to the Jilin Petroleum and Chemical Company in the northeastern Chinese province of Heilongjiang on November 13, 2005, caused 100 metric tons of potentially lethal benzene to spill into the Songhua and came close to creating an environmental catastrophe in the Russian Far East as a massive slick passed along the Amur.
China failed to inform Russia until days after the incident.
