Three flavors of the apocalypse

Take your pick: earthquake, bird flu, or benzene.

Ok, so the first two are mostly just rumours (in the part of the country that I'm in, anyway), but the third one was definitely no joke. About two weeks ago, a petrochemical plant in the city of Jilin had an explosion, killing a handful of people, wounding around 70, and resulting in the evacuation of about 10,000 more. The explosion also released about 100 tons of chemicals (mainly benzene) into the water of the Songhua River, which flows a couple hundred miles north from Jilin until it reaches Harbin, where I've been camped out for the past several months. According to the CDC, benzene is a nasty drug that can kill a person pretty quickly (if exposed to very high concentrations all at once) or cause leukemia (in cases of long-term exposure), along with a bunch of other fun effects. Realistically, the levels of benzene once it has been diluted in a river probably wouldn't straight out kill a person, and I probably won't be sticking around in China to have long-term exposure, but it still didn't sound very appealing. (Check out the CDC toxicology report.)

But most of the people in Harbin weren't thinking about this at all on last Monday morning. I, for one, was worrying about my homework for literature class that afternoon. Despite having known for the better part of a week that there was a 50 mile stretch of water in the Songhua River headed our way with a benzene concentration over 100 times the national acceptable level, the government had not yet alerted the people or even acknowledged that there was any pollution. Yet the word got out anyway, and by Monday afternoon rumours were spreading fast. In my 3:30pm literature class I heard rumors that the water supply for the whole city would be turned off the next morning; by the time class let out at 5:15pm, there was not a bottle of water to be found in any of the stores on campus. Everything potable, except for alcohol, was off the shelves and there were hour-long lines at all of the registers. Some of the other foreign students and I decided to high-tail it to the German-owned import supermarket outside of town. We figured that, as it was out of the way and required a membership card to enter, it might not have experienced the same mad rush as everywhere else. We squeezed six people into the one taxi we could find and made it out there, only to find that it was swarming with people, too. Our only saving grace was that the Chinese people there had never heard of Gatorade, and there were boxes and boxes of it just sitting next to the ransacked shelves of water. Only after all of the waiguoren (foreigners) had nabbed half of the boxes did some people start to catch on that they could actually drink this funny-looking stuff. We also nabbed some PB&J and (very expensive) Campbell's soup that we hoped would tide us over.

When the government finally did make an announcement, they stated that they would indeed be turning off the water, but they didn't mention the pollution, stating that it was for "routine pipe maintenance." Plus one of the state news channels ran a special on earthquake safety, sparking a rumour that there would be an earthquake in the next few days. Every day the rumours changed; at first it was that there was going to be one today, then there was going to be one tomorrow morning (between 2am and 4am), then that there already was one somewhere nearby and that we would be feeling the aftereffects, so on and so forth. All of our Chinese roommates started sleeping with their clothes on and shoes at the foot of the bed so that they could hit the ground running. One of the teachers advised one of my classmates to leave glasses on the ground so that he could hear them clinking together and know that the earthquake was starting. Never mind that even using the most advanced earthquake prediction technology in the world there was no way of predicting the day on which an earthquake would happen (let alone the hour). If we even tried to mention that to our roommates they responded that Harbin shared an earthquake warning system with Beijing, which had pretty much the most advanced technology there was, so if they said that there would be an earthquake between two and four A.M., then there would be an earthquake between two and four A.M.

If the earthquake scare was planned, then I must admit that it was a pretty ingenious ploy. Although people were still cramming themselves into line at the supermarket to buy any new shipments of water that came in, they were mostly talking about what they should do when the earthquake hit, rather than how the government knew about the whole water thing for a week and didn't bother warning them. Gradually, the people also built up an atmosphere in which anybody who left town or questioned the government's information was a deserter or a coward. On Tuesday night, the government turned on the water again for a couple of hours to allow people to stock up so that they would have some reserves in order to flush their toilets. When one of my American classmates tried to tell his Chinese roommate that maybe he shouldn't take a shower (as there had already been reports about the rising levels of benzene in the water), the roommate said he didn't believe that because it was from a foreign news source, and foreign news sources all just wanted to make China look bad in order to hurt its development. He only believes the (state-censored) national media, he said, and if the government turned the water back on then that meant it was 100% safe to use. Yikes.

Anyway, so a day or two later, after our parents had complained sufficiently (and after my muscles started atrophying from a diet mostly composed of crackers, peanut butter, and gatorade) our program director decided that we ought to just go ahead and evacuate. None of the universities, ours included, had given the students a vacation, so we had to handle the situation carefully or bring down the wrath of the administration and the bitterness of the other students, foreign and Chinese alike. Our director had to come up with some story about how we were going to Beijing for a "cultural exchange," which we had apparently already planned weeks ago, so it was just a coincidence that it happened at the same time as the whole water fiasco. She even wrote a letter and pre-dated it two weeks, informing the university of the plan. Of course this was all to keep them from losing face, because they didn't want people knowing that their American program just ditched out on them despite their declaration that classes would continue as normal and that there was nothing to be worried about.

We flew out on Thursday (Thanksgiving!). Taking the train would have been cheaper, but all of the train tickets were long gone and there was a rumour that they'd stopped selling more train tickets out of the city to keep everyone from bailing (although who knows if that was any more credible than the earthquake rumours). Our program, CET, also has a Beijing program, so we've been staying in their extra dorm rooms, eating at their cafeteria, and using their extra classrooms. We thought we might get a bit of a break, but our academic coordinator made sure that all of our classes (excluding the one-on-one tutorials) would continue as planned. We brought a couple of our teachers, and recruited a few of CET Beijing's teachers to fill in the gaps. So overall it's been pretty much as busy as usual. We've also been taking advantage of the food available here, the quality of which greatly exceeds most of what's available in Harbin. So far I've had Greek, Thai, Mexican, and Japanese, not to mention a Turkey dinner on Thanksgiving and a Beijing Roast Duck dinner the next day with some of the students from the Stanford in Beijing program (including my friend Pat).

Since I've been in Beijing, the international press has also really picked up on the Harbin story. That, coupled with the fact that I actually have reliable internet access now, helped me hear a lot more about what was going on in Harbin than when I was actually there. The attempt at a cover-up of and "solutions" to the problem were really amazing. When they learned about the initial spill into the river, the Jilin government tried to just release more water from their reservoir in order to dilute the pollutants so that they wouldn't have to inform the public. Eventually the government did tell the people of Harbin and shut off the water in order to keep high doses of benzene out of the pipes, but that was after the toxins had already flowed a couple of hundred miles from Jilin. Nobody told all the people in the villages along the river in between Jilin and Harbin that they shouldn't be using the water. And now the main "solution" to the problem is to let the area of most concentrated pollution flow downstream. Triumphant articles now report that "we won!" because water can be turned back on in Harbin, but what they really mean is that the bulk of it has just flowed past the city and onto somewhere else. That somewhere else is Russia, and the Russians are seriously pissed. The Chinese government did issue an apology to the Russians, who are now planning on dumping 50 tons of carbon into the river (which is called the Amur River up there) to try to absorb the toxins once they cross the border in a couple of weeks.

Since the story has been getting so much press, China is trying to put a positive spin on things, highlighting how they managed to keep Harbin supplied with drinking water throughout the week and how they (eventually) offered information on the incident to international organizations. Premier Wen Jiabao even spent a couple of days around Harbin trying to boost morale. I heard tell he came to HIT (our university) and visited some of the dorms. 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)

As for my current situation, it seems that my program will stay in Beijing until the water is 100% up and running. The government turned the water back on on Sunday, but cautioned that it is pretty much useless for anything but flushing the toilets, as a week without use have left the pipes rusty. Once all of the rust is flushed out, then it will be "safe to use" and we'll be on the next plane back up there. But some people have (probably appropriately) raised the question of whether we can actually believe that everything is as safe as the government says it is, especially as they were eager to show results and a quick turnaround to normalcy after their embarrassment at the initial poor handling of the situation. Not to mention that they haven't really addressed the level of benzene that may have seeped into the groundwater or been frozen into the ice chunks that are forming as the weather gets colder and colder. Maybe it will be perfectly fine (goodness knows the river was already polluted before this and none of us got extremely sick), but nobody seems too keen on being used as a guinea pig to find out.

So, I guess I'm not really sure what to expect, especially as we only really have three weeks of the program left. I'm tempted to just call it quits now, especially as I don't need the credits. I've learned a whole lot since I've been here, but the language pledge is unravelling fast and I'm getting less and less out of the classes, as everyone is just trying to get the last couple of weeks over and done with. I've definitely been spoiled by a 10-week quarter system, so now a three-and-a-half month symester is pushing it. We'll see how it goes...

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A bunch of articles on the situation in Harbin are at:
-The New York Times
-The Washington Post
-Google News

(If those links don't work, just go to the newspaper websites and do a search for "harbin")

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