Sewage dumping disrupts water supply in China city

Ben Blanchard in Reuters: About 50,000 residents in a southern Chinese city had their water supplies disrupted after a fish farm discharged sewage into the local water source, state media said Sunday, in the country's latest pollution incident.

Authorities in Foshan city, an industrial part of export- dependent Guangdong province close to Hong Kong, discovered the problem Saturday and immediately stopped taking water from the stream, the official Xinhua news agency reported. "Initial investigations showed the aquatic farm ... had discharged waste water into the stream," it said.

The part of the city affected has since taken measures to make up for the lost supply, and as of Sunday the number of people facing disruption had come down to around 1,000 people, Xinhua added.

Pollution, especially when it threatens relatively prosperous urban citizens, is a growing source of concern for Chinese people and has even sparked protests, a major worry for the stability-obsessed ruling Communist Party...

Location of Foshan in Guangdong, map by Herr Klugbeisser, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license