“On bad days, you cannot see the other side of a four-lane road,” Johnson writes. “Earlier this year, a factory leaked a toxic chemical in to the Zhuozhang River, which feeds the city’s reservoir.
The river turned brown, dead fish were found floating on the surface, and city’s water was cut off overnight.”
This past summer, the photographer Sim Chi Yin, whose photograph accompanies Johnson’s article, spent some time in Handan, which is two hundred and fifty miles to the southwest of Beijing, to document the pollution.
“What troubled me most was Sihoupo”—a western suburb of Handan—she told me. “Driving around for days, we found Sihoupo, and the branch of the Hansteel factory less than a hundred metres away from it, belching out grey, black, and yellow smoke and steam around the clock.
At times, naked flames can be seen shooting up from the coking plant. Families ate and children played less than a hundred metres away from the giant chimney. The smoke sometimes floats low, over their corn fields.
I climbed up a hillside overlooking the village and the factory, and met shepherds herding their sheep there, eating the crops, grass often blanketed by the emissions from the coking plant.
Women and men gathered outside their village houses before their evening meal spoke about cancer cases and miscarriages. There’s no way to verify all that, since no studies have been done. It was sobering and saddening.”
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