A young journalist in China explains clearly, on his must-read blog, why central government authorities as well as Jilin and Harbin authorities must take responsibility for the disaster along the Songhua river.:

Now that everybody’s jumping in on the benzene spill incident, it seems there’s hardly any aspect of the story that hasn’t been covered by domestic or foreign media — from the Fascist rule of the CNPC subsidiary’s chief manager, Yu Li, to the old man shuddering in the howl of Harbin’s cold wind waiting in a long line to get rationed water, to the unsuspecting Heilongjiang fishermen who kept on catching and eating fish from the Songhua while the toxic stretch of water slowly passed their domain. Now everybody knows there was a shameful cover-up.

A friend who works at Jilin city’s drinking water corporation told me that they started testing water samples in the Songhua the night of the explosions. Although they mostly sampled water near their intake points, there’s reason to believe that they knew some pollution probably was created. I also got on the phone with water-quality supervision officials from the provincial capital of Changchun, who said that they were stationed in Songyuan (downstream of Jilin city, near the border of the two provinces) to monitor river water contamination levels 24 hours a day between Nov. 15 (two days after the explosion) and Nov. 24. On Nov. 16, they found the water with benzene levels over 60 times the national standard. It peaked on Nov. 17, when benzene reached more than 300 times above national standard. Hell, they knew it from the very beginning.

But according to Heilongjiang officials, their bretheren in Jilin didn’t notify them of the contamination until Nov. 18. The truth may be even more shocking. My colleague who went to Harbin learned that Jilin authorities probably never sounded the alarm to Heilongjiang — the latter only knew about the toxins in the river on Nov. 19, when their own water-quality monitoring outposts tested alarmingly high levels of benzene near Zhaoyuan.

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Despite what some people may think, the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) didn’t play an honorable role either, at least not initially. They also knew about the spill from the very beginning. SEPA sent officials down to Jilin on Nov. 13, and they later claimed they tested and found benzene in Jilin waters on that day. In theory they should have access to all statistics from both provinces all along, and we confirmed this partially. Again, they chose to remain silent until Nov. 23. Presumably the central government agency waited out the finger-pointing and political bantering between the two provinces, and then jumped in at the perfect moment to play God.

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