This is not the sort of thing you want to wake up and see in your town. Xinmeizhou village eastern China witnessed their once pristine river change from clear to blood red in a matter of hours. Once the color started spreading, it didn’t take long to ruin everyone’s river experience. From China Radio International:
Local residents say the river was running normally at 4am, but it started to redden at around 6am, and in no time turned as crimson as blood.
One villager who has lived his whole life by the river side said this has never happened before.
The villager recalled that there wasn’t a chemical plant along the upper stream.
Inspectors from the Wenzhou Environmental Protection Bureau are now at the site to take samples and analyze the cause of the incident.
You can see more pics over at the China Radio International web site or you can go buy a bunch of Kool-Aid at the store and create your own river of blood in the bathtub. It’ll be like Saturday at the Flanders’ compound.
There are no definite answers for why this happened or who is to blame, but most are claiming that the culprit is man made. From ABC News:
“We suspect that somebody dumped artificial coloring in the water because he thought the typhoon yesterday would cause heavy rain, and nobody would notice [the color],” Jianfeng Xiao, Chief of the bureau told China News.
“It turned out there wasn’t heavy rainfall yesterday, so the evidence is left behind,” Xiao said.
Xiao said there is a paper manufacturer, a food coloring company and clothing-maker a long the river. The bureau is still investigating the incident.
Someone should question the villager who said there was no chemical plant up river. I think he is hiding something.
This revelation doesn’t fully rule out the wrath of a vengeful deity, of course. It just puts a damper on my end of the world plans. Looks like I’ll have to put all this heroin away for a rainy day or something. Or dump it in a river.
(Via ABC News / China Radio International)