A 14-hour stint on the day job for AsiaPundit means light blogging. There really be no blogging by AP at all, I do have co-pundits somewhere. But as none have posted today, AP will offer a brief post on Harbin’s water quality.

As Laurence Oliver asked in Marathon Man, “is it safe?”:

China Daily’s web site reported that China cut off water supplies to more communities along Songhua River, but Beijing offers no estimates about how many people rely on the river for drinking water.

China’s Central Television said at least 10,000 people downstream in Yilan County were without water service on Monday.

And in Harbin, officials warned that the water wasn’t safe to drink after lying in underground pipes for five days. The government did not say when that (safe to drink) was expected to happen, according to some media reports.

I was confused. Did the governor of Heilongjiang take the first sip of the resumed running water on Sunday night as a move to show that the water was safe enough for people to drink?

So the water wasn’t safe? That’s unfortunate. But, although environmental testing says it isn’t safe to drink, we can be assured that the taste test confirms that, as Chester said in Dude Where’s My Car, it’s ’sweet.’

In another attempt at morale boosting, the governor drank the first cup of water out of the filtration plant when the water was turned back on on Sunday, although he cautioned that experts had not yet said that the water was safe to drink, but he was doing so in order to “fulfill the government’s promise.” He also mentioned that the water “was a little hot but tastes very sweet,” which is not exactly reassuring to anyone who read the CDC toxicology report describing benzene as “a colorless liquid with a sweet odor.” (The governor’s quotes are from xinhua news itself)

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