Lanzhou scare causes bottled water rush
Print Edition
Residents have been rushing to buy bottled water in Lanzhou, capital of China’s northwest Gansu Province, after their tap water began smelling of ammonia. Local authorities, however, denied it was polluted.
The scare followed an earlier incident when the city’s water was found to be seriously polluted in April last year, Xinhua news agency said.
A woman surnamed Qi told Xinhua: “There is an ammonia nitrogen odor and it smells very bad. It has a bitter taste and we will stop using tap water.”
On Wednesday night, the city government issued a statement saying the water was safe to drink.
It said tests had shown the water, produced by the Veolia Water Group Co Ltd, a Sino-French joint venture and the city’s sole water supplier, contained 0.36 to 0.48 milligrams of ammonia nitrogen, lower than the national limit of 0.5.
To eliminate the odor, Veolia is to add more activated carbon to purify the water and ensure water quality, it said. Meanwhile, supervisors from the city’s construction authority would monitor situation for a month.
It said a possible reason behind the smell was algae and decomposing leaves and it would step up efforts to remove them from waterways. It will also check factories along the Huangshui River, an upper tributary of the Yellow River, as ammonia nitrogen can be generated from petrochemical processing.
Ministry of Environmental Protection figures show that the Huangshui, which is more than 10 kilometers from where Veolia sources its water, has been badly polluted for the past three months.
Weekly reports released from November 13 last year to February 28 list Huangshui water as “inferior to grade V,” even worse than the poorest level in China’s five-scale water quality index. The main pollutant was identified as ammonia nitrogen.
Grade I is drinkable, while grade V water can only be used for agriculture. Water worse than grade V can’t even be used in agriculture.
Tap water contamination affected 2.4 million people in Lanzhou last April, when levels of cancer-causing benzene in the city’s tap water rose 20 times above safety levels.
An official investigation found crude oil had leaked from a petrochemical pipeline.
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