Water supplies to a northwestern Chinese city were cut off for a day after leaking oil from a petrochemical plant contaminated the city’s water treatment plant, highlighting once again the dangers posed by China’s ageing pipelines and untrammelled development.
A water channel between two water treatment plants run by French infrastructure firm Veolia in Lanzhou crossed over a corroded pipe belonging to China National Petroleum Corp, the country’s largest oil firm, the local government said on Saturday. Residential water supply was cut on Friday in Lanzhou, which has a population of 4.6m, after Veolia registered a spike in levels of benzene, a carcinogen, in the water it was treating.
The incident in Lanzhou comes only a few months after 62 people were killed in the coastal city of Qingdao after crude oil from a pipeline belonging to China’s other major oil firm, Sinopec, leaked into storm sewers and exploded.