China cut off water supplies to more communities along a poisoned river in its northeast Monday as it celebrated the return of running water to the city of Harbin.

Downstream in Russia, authorities were bracing for the 50-mile-long stretch of cancer-causing benzene to arrive within days.

The chemical spill has been winding its way down the Songhua River in the two weeks since a factory explosion in the city of Jilin. Beijing has offered no estimates on how many people rely on the river for drinking water.

The Chinese government was forced to shut off running water to 3.8 million residents of Harbin for five days. It restored service Sunday but warned that the water was not safe to drink.

On Monday, 10,000 people downstream in Yilan County were without water service, China Central Television reported.

The Nov. 13 explosion killed five people, forced 10,000 to flee their homes and spewed about 100 tons of benzene into the river. Benzene is an industrial chemical known to pose a leukemia risk at high concentrations.

In Harbin, the taps were on again but officials warned that the water wasn't safe to drink after lying in underground pipes for five days. They said radio and television bulletins would announce when the supply was clean enough first to bathe in and later to drink. The government did not say when that was expected to happen.

"It's back, but I don't know what I can use it for yet," said Guan Hongya, a manager for a textile company in Harbin. "We can use it to flush the toilet, but otherwise it might be no good."

The Songhua River flows into the larger Heilong River, which is called the Amur in Russia.

Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry said the pollutants could affect 70 Russian cities and villages with a total of more than 1 million residents along the Amur river, including Khabarovsk, a city of 580,000.

The benzene slick was expected to reach Khabarovsk on Dec. 10-12 �� or sooner.

Chinese, Russian official met Monday night to discuss how to deal with the contamination, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Zhang Lijun, vice director of China's State Environmental Protection Administration expressed apologies to the Russian Delegation of Khabarovsk Environmental Protection Bureau during their talks in Harbin.

The talks included the impact that the polluted Songhua River will have on the Heilongjiang River, the border of the two nations, and the cooperation that China and Russia will make to monitor and test the quality of their border river.

The official also reported in detail to the delegation the related information of the river pollution, including the sorts of pollutants, the density and the location of the pollution belt.

He said the SEPA will report the latest information concerning the quality of the Songhua River to Russia in line with the instruction of Premier Wen Jiabao.

V. V. Dardiuk, director of the delegation, expressed gratitude toward China's reports and discussed his country's coping measures.

He said Khabarovsk has cooperated with Heilongjiang Province in the border river quality monitoring and testing for four years and believes that the problem will be settled through mutual efforts.

Source: China Daily