Bungling, delay, cover-up. When such missteps follow a major disaster, officials often have to resign. We saw it unfold in the United States after the killer hurricane Katrina. Now we’re seeing heads roll in China, following the Nov. 13 chemical plant explosion that killed five people and spilled 100 tons of benzene-like carcinogens into the Songhua River.
…A high-level probe is underway. It’s already becoming evident that provincial authorities in Jilin–where the explosion took place–and senior CNPC figures downplayed the extent of the catastrophe, hindering official responses. The day after the blast, Xie had received a phone call from a senior Jilin provincial official who told the environmental protection agency head that the Songhua River contamination was not that serious and could be handled by provincial authorities on their own, says a source close to SEPA officials who requested anonymity because he wasn’t cleared to speak publicly about the incident.
The other problem, he says, is that the “local environmental protection department reports to local authorities.” It’s supposed to notify SEPA in Beijing about environmental matters–but its salaries are paid by the government in its region, not by Beijing. So the local environmental protection department didn’t report the results of water quality tests from the Songhua River to SEPA until Nov. 17–a full four days after the explosion, according to SEPA deputy director Wang Yuqing, who also charged that China’s blind pursuit of economic growth has led to a quarter century of growing environmental degradation.
The state environmental protection agency didn’t immediately dispatch its own inspectors to Jilin. And while Jilin authorities informed downstream communities in their own province about the toxic spill, they at first neglected to inform their counterparts further downstream in neighboring Heilongjiang province. Jilin provincial authorities even ordered enormous amounts of water to be released from a dam into the Songhua river in an attempt to dilute the pollution within Jilin’s borders “which served to push the slick towards Heilongjiang even faster,” says the source. When Premier Wen visited the region on an emergency inspection tour in late November, Xie was among a group of government and party officials who accompanied him. The same Jilin boss was among those who met Wen at the Harbin airport, and in a subsequent briefing he at one point turned to Xie and said something to the effect of “Didn’t I call you right afterwards?”, according to the source close to SEPA. Xie was reportedly stunned and could only stammer “Yes, yes” in response, says the source, who adds, “What else could Xie say? That he knew [about the extent of the pollution] but helped the Jilin people cover it up? This obviously made a bad impression on Wen.”
