Libertarian paradise, what the Koch brothers, etc. want for the world. Doesn't matter to them, they can afford purified water.http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/20/3092861/china-orange-ammonia-river-coal/
By Emily Atkin on December 20, 2013
American Public Media’s Marketplace.org published a heartbreaking story on Thursday of the hundreds of people in China who bathe in and drink from a stream that runs through the mining town of Majiapo, which just so happens to be bright orange.
The “winding river of gatorade” has been this way for nearly a year, and is caused by “acid mine drainage,” which is discharged acidic water from an abandoned coal mine. It is contaminated with sulfuric acid and heavy metals, according to Marketplace’s report, and has a strong taste of ammonia. Sometimes it stains the villagers’ skin orange. Other times it causes diarrhea.
“It’s completely toxic,” Ma Huiming, a resident of Majiapo, told Marketplace. “But we’re too poor to afford to drink anything else. I worry about what it’ll do to my children, what kind of diseases they’ll get. People who can afford to leave for the city have moved.”
The report says that this kind of coal cocktail is a problem throughout Shanxi province, which produces one-third of the country’s abundant coal. China currently has approximately 2,300 coal plants, but the Shanxi province in particular is known for having coal pollution problems. In 2007, rates of birth defects in the country had risen 40 percent since 2001, which Chinese officials at the time blamed on emissions from Shanxi’s large coal and chemical industries. In 2009, the BBC reported that those birth defects had soared with the occurrence of one of the worst droughts in 50 years, with the defects mainly showing up in the Shanxi province.
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