ANOTHER toxic chemical spill into a Chinese river has forced officials to cut off water to cities and villages along the Bei waterway in a southern province near the border with Hong Kong.

The Shaoguan smelting plant discharged the waste during equipment maintenance last week, polluting the river in Guangdong province with cadmium, a poisonous soft metal.

It was the second such disaster in China in as many months, after an explosion at a chemical plant in the northeast poisoned drinking water for millions and sent a frozen, poisonous slick downriver into Russia.

When levels of cadmium in the Bei were found to be ten times higher than normal several days ago, water supplies were cut off to villages and factories around Yingde, a city of 100,000 people 90km (56 miles) downstream from Shaoguan.

At a suburban cement plant in Yingde fire engines dispensed drinking water to thousands of people. “Taps are only on in the evening for a couple of hours,” said a worker who gave his surname as Lu. “We’ve been collecting drinking water with plastic buckets from fire engines since Sunday.”

Cadmium, a metallic element widely used in batteries, can cause liver and kidney damage and lead to bone diseases. Compounds containing cadmium are also carcinogenic. The most polluted water reached Shakou township, 30km upstream from Yingde, where dam gates were lowered to stall its advance. “We want to dilute the toxins there by reservoirs further upstream and then flush them quickly past Yingde,” said a government spokesman. “But we are still waiting for the experts to decide when to do that.”

Officials in Guangzhou, the provincial capital, have been told to draw up emergency plans to ensure safe drinking water for its nine million residents. In keeping with China’s policy of secrecy about disasters, provincial environmental officials said that they were unaware of the pollution.

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