Chinese city suspends water supplies over "quality abnormalities"

Reuters: Authorities in the eastern Chinese city of Jingjiang have suspended water supplies after quality abnormalities were detected, state media said on Friday, with hundreds of thousands of people affected in China's latest water pollution scare. Officials in Jingjiang, a city on the Yangtze River in Jiangsu province, did not offer any further details about why the water was shut off, the official Xinhua news agency said.

"The government has started an emergency response plan," Xinhua said, citing a brief government microblog post. State broadcaster CCTV said 680,000 people had been affected by the shut-off. It quoted other domestic media as saying supplies would resume later on Friday.

Concern over water quality in Jingjiang comes soon after the cancer-inducing chemical benzene was found to be 20 times above national safety levels in the western city of Lanzhou in April. That prompted a rush on bottled water in the heavily industrialized city of 3.6 million people in Gansu province, one of China's most polluted cities....

The Peaceful and Fluent Bridge in Jingjiang, shot by BenBen, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 Generic license