BEIJING, July 30 (Xinhuanet) -- About 7,000 chemical barrels have been swept into a major river in northeast China's Jilin Province.
The containers ended up in the Songhua River in Jilin City. Three-thousand were filled with chemicals while the rest are empty. The state environmental watchdog and the local government responded immediately to retrieve the barrels and monitor water quality. So far, 1,500 barrels have been recovered.
The containers were first spotted in the Songhua River on Wednesday.
They first entered the Wende River and then flowed into the Songhua River, after floods hit the storage facilities of two chemical factories in Yongji County.
Wang Mingchen, said, "Flash floods hit Yongji and the water was five meters deep in some areas. The warehouses of the Jilin Xin-ya-qiang Biochem Company and Jilin Zhong-xin Group were flooded. four-thousand empty barrels and three-thousand barrels full of chemicals were washed into the Wende River and then flowed into the Songhua River."
Each chemical-filled barrel contains about 170 kilograms of chemicals.
Of the 3,000 chemical-filled barrels, about 2,500 contain trimethyl chloro silicane.
It is a a colorless flammable liquid with a pungent odor.
The rest contain hexamethyl disilazane -- a colorless liquid with a pungent odor.
(Source: CCTV)
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