The New York Times Report

DALIAN, China — Three weeks after a flood of heavy crude oil fouled scores of miles of this immense northern city’s beaches and rocky coastline, a remarkable — some would say heroic — cleanup effort has scrubbed away most traces of the spill.

Whether Dalian’s government can eradicate damning accounts of a major industrial accident and a narrowly averted catastrophe that could have killed thousands, on the other hand, remains in considerable doubt.

Since July 16, when an explosion and fire ruptured a pipe linking a berthed oil tanker to an onshore storage facility at the PetroChina port, officials here have strained to minimize the scope of the damage. Their version of events, released shortly after the spill, states that a broken pipe leaked 1,500 metric tons, or about 11,000 barrels, of crude into the bay off Dalian’s northeastern coast. It states that the spill occurred after workers unloading oil from the berthed ship accidentally set off an explosion and fire and that the oil was quickly contained before it could enter international waters.

That remains the official story this week. But an investigation by the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace and accounts by two experts with authoritative knowledge of what happened make a compelling case for an alternative account.

The Greenpeace report, issued last week, said that as the fire from the explosion spread, large quantities of oil were deliberately released from onshore tanks to avert devastating damage to a tank at the storage facility that was filled with dimethylbenzene, a flammable and poisonous gas used to make aviation fuel and solvents. Had the oil fire reached that tank, the report said, the resulting explosion could have released a toxic cloud endangering the entire area.

This week, two experts with detailed knowledge of the accident confirmed that account, with one saying that the cloud could have killed thousands of people.

Those experts, who asked for anonymity out of fear of government retaliation, said that emergency workers deliberately opened release valves on one huge oil tank, fearing the fire could cause it to explode and crack open the tank of toxic gas. They said the workers decided to empty the tank in part because pumping the oil out would take too long, and because the explosion and fire had in any case disabled a pipeline. The released oil flowed downhill into the sea.

The emptied tank most likely was filled with 50,000 metric tons, or between 315,000 and 365,000 barrels, of crude. Greenpeace experts said that much of that could have burned off in the fire that night. But other experts said in interviews that they were skeptical that much of the released oil had burned off, because heavy crude of the sort involved in the Dalian spill is less flammable than lighter oil.

A day touring Dalian’s cleaned-up coast reveals not only strong indications of a public relations makeover, but also widespread skepticism among residents that the government was telling the whole story on the size of the spill.

“It couldn’t possibly have been 1,500 tons,” one Dalian business owner whose workers joined in the cleanup said Tuesday.

“The thick oil layer stretched as far as the eye could see,” he said, standing above a restored beach. “It was so thick that the most effective way of collecting it was to scoop it up in your bare arms and push it into the barrel.” Fearful of government retaliation, he declined to give his name.

On Dalian’s far southern coast, about 15 miles from the accident site, another man stood at a seaside overlook and described the pall that descended over this city of more than six million after the pipeline explosion.

“The sky over Dalian that night was pitch black, and there was an acrid smell, and ashes falling,” said the man, who gave his name as Mr. Yin. “Even here there were big patches of oil. It was really serious.”

On Tuesday, a rocky cove there still bore a smear of tide-carried black oil, as well as sheets draped over the rocks to soak it up.

But by any measure, the spill was easily the worst in China’s history, though far smaller than some of the world’s more notorious accidents. The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill dumped 270,000 barrels of oil and fouled 1,200 miles of the southern Alaska coast. This year’s spill in the Gulf of Mexico is estimated at almost five million barrels.

A satellite photograph taken two days after the Dalian spill and published on the environmental Web site skytruth.org suggests that the oil had spread far into the sea from the spill site and was swept along the coastline.

The China National Petroleum Corporation, the parent company of PetroChina, states on its Web site that the Dalian accident released “a small amount” of oil and sewage water into the bay. The company’s officials did not return a request for comment on the accounts of a much larger accident.

In Dalian on Tuesday, cleanup workers and suppliers of cleanup equipment described an unworldly scene, with a 3-foot layer of thick crude stretching in every direction for hundreds of yards from the leak, gradually thinning.

There appears to have been little if any contingency planning for a spill. The initial team of cleanup workers lacked protective clothes, and some said on Tuesday that they had become ill or developed allergic reactions after being soaked in the crude. They soaked up the oil with straw mats and stockings filled with donated human hair.

The Dalian government offered volunteers about $44 for every barrel of recovered oil. The ensuing cleanup frenzy was so intense that the government ran out of barrels, creating a black market that increased the barrel price fivefold. Some four- or five-person boat crews said they raked in as much as $14,000 for a day of work.

But the cleanup still is not complete. On Tuesday evening, at a dock in southern Dalian that holds about 100 fishing boats, Yan Yongsheng, 41, who made a profit running straw mats to the spill site, said he had gone back to his real business, deep-sea fishing. His last run, he said, was Monday.

We went about two nautical miles off the coast,” he said. “There were still oil sheens there.” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/world/asia/05dalian.html?_r=1&hp

3 Children and a Teacher Killed in Chinese School Attack

BEIJING — A knife-wielding man went on a slashing rampage in a kindergarten in eastern China, leaving three children and one teacher dead, area residents reported Wednesday.

The unidentified assailant entered the school in a suburb of Zibo in Shandong province at about 4 p.m. Tuesday as parents were picking up their children, according to people living nearby contacted by telephone.

About 20 children and staff were injured, two of the children seriously, they said.

China this year has suffered a spate of gory rampage attacks on schools and in public spaces, leaving dozens of people dead and scores wounded.

A woman who works in a restaurant opposite the Boshan District Experimental Kindergarten’s Jinfengyuan branch said the attacker was a man aged 27 or 28 who had gained entry to the school by posing as a parent.

Police rushed to the kindergarten soon after the attack and officers transported some injured children to hospital before ambulances had time to arrive, said the woman, who would give only her surname, Zhang.

”The kindergarten has been sealed off until now. There’re still police officers there,” Zhang said.

Zhang and other area residents said the teacher died of her injuries Wednesday morning.

The Zibo killings came just two days after a man in Hebei province to the west went on a rampage at the wheel of his earthmover, smashing vehicles and buildings and leaving 17 dead.

Other recent mass killings include a May 12 attack on a kindergarten in the northern province of Shaanxi that left seven children and two adults dead and the wounding of 29 children at a kindergarten in Jiangsu province in April.

The seemingly unrelated attacks have prompted calls for more attention to diagnosing serious mental illnesses and ignited fears over the toll stress is taking on the nation’s emotional health.

Authorities have responded with increased security at schools and orders to limit media coverage of the attacks to discourage copycats.

Local officials in Zibo hung up the phone when reporters called for information on the attack. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/08/03/world/AP-AS-China-Students-Attacked.html?ref=asia&pagewanted=print