TONGJIANG (China), December 17 (RIA Novosti, Alexei Yefimov) - China will finance the construction of a dam on Amur's tributary, a spokesman for the country's Ministry of Water Resources said Saturday. Wan Haibin said China had started building the dam December 16 to prevent the polluted water from reaching the Russian Far East city of Khabarovsk.
He also said the dam would be dismantled when the toxic slick was gone.
The slick, which formed after about 100 metric tons of chemicals were dumped into a Chinese tributary of the Amur River after a November 13 explosion at a petrochemicals plant, is currently passing through the town of Tongjiang where the Songhua River falls into the Amur.
Zou Jianhua, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's advisor, said China would also provide Russia with two gas chromatographs for chemical analysis and 1,000 tons of absorbent carbon to fight against the pollution of the Amur River. China had already handed six chromatographs and 150 tons of coal to Russia.
Liu Ming, a spokesman for the Chinese state environmental protection department, said the two countries could sign a memorandum on joint monitoring of the ecological condition of border rivers in February 2006 when Russian Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev was expected to visit China,
China drafted the memorandum in 2004 and handed it to the Russian side. Liu Ming said the draft had almost been coordinated.
