A ship owner was arrested on Friday following a massive spill of
concentrated sulfuric acid last August on the Grand Canal, a
900-year-old canal in east China, which forced more than 1,500
residents to evacuate.
Xu Changjun, 41, owner of the cargo ship, will face criminal
charges, according to prosecutors.
Xu allegedly used a secondhand cargo ship to carry 220 tons of
concentrated sulfuric acid on July 30 this year from Suzhou, east
China's Jiangsu Province, to Hangzhou, in neighboring
Zhejiang Province, along the Grand Canal.
The ship was damaged after it ran aground on July 27. Xu had it
repaired and put it immediately back into operation without
obtaining a test certificate from ship administration authorities
as required.
In the early hours of Aug. 2, the ship captain saw river water
entering the cabin and sulfuric acid started to leak that evening.
Ignoring the captain's reports, Xu ordered the ship to
continue.
The ship ran aground in the Hangzhou section of the canal in the
early hours of Aug. 3. All 220 tons of concentrated sulfuric acid
aboard leaked into the river.
The leakage forced over 1,500 residents of Tangxi and Renhe
towns to flee their homes because of the dangerous fumes given off
by the leaked acid. Fish died by the thousands in the polluted
section of the canal, and navigation was suspended for 10
hours.
The local environmental protection authorities poured 900 tons
of liquid alkali into the water to dilute the pollution.
The 1,794-km canal, linking Beijing and Hangzhou, still has a
1,000-km navigable section, mainly between Jining City of Shandong Province and Zhejiang. It is the
longest artificial river in the world, as well as a key north-south
water channel in China.
Completed in 1291, the Grand Canal starts from Tongzhou District
of Beijing in the north and runs 1,794 kilometers southward to
Hangzhou of east China's Zhejiang Province. The project traverses
five major rivers in China -- the Haihe River, the Yellow River,
the Huaihe River, the Yangtze River and the Qiantang River -- and
six provinces.
(Xinhua News Agency November 18, 2006)