Toxic slick from China reaches the Amur River

TONGJIANG/KHABAROVSK. Dec 17 (Interfax) - Part of the benzene slick moving down the Songhua River, an Amur tributary, has reached the confluence with the Amur, Heilongjiang province environment monitoring center deputy chief Song Nanzhe told a group of Russian journalists on Saturday.

The head of the toxic slick reached the Amur on Friday, and the highest level of pollution in the Songhua was recorded near the city of Tongjiang in Heilongjiang, Song said.

Six Russian-Chinese monitoring stations have been deployed, and they take water samples for analysis every two hours, he said.

Journalists, who visited a water quality analysis laboratory in the local environment protection department, were informed about the pollution level of the Songhua as of 8:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. local time (3:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. Moscow time) Saturday. The analysis showed that the content of nitrobenzene was 0.160 mg per liter at 8:00 a.m. and 0.156 mg per liter at 10:00 a.m. The first figure is 9.41 times higher than the maximum permissible level, and the second, 9 times, by Chinese standards.