A large-scale maneuver aimed to be better able to deal with a possible terror attack on water sources was launched Friday morning in the central China province of Henan and eastern Jiangsu province.

The maneuver, which comprised two exercises and was organized by the State Environmental Protection Administration, is the first of its kind ever conducted in China.

One of the exercises started at 07:50 am, when the administration received an urgent report about several terrorists having pushed a truck loaded with sodium cyanide, a highly-toxic chemical, into the Yinghe River in the city of Luohe in Henan province. The water was soon seriously polluted and became fatally poisonous, flowing towards the urban area at a speed of five kilometers an hour.

With the help of a remote command system, the administration staff immediately resorted to prompt counter measures, arousing local related departments of environmental protection, quarantine inspection, and police forces to move to the accident scene.

In the meantime, the administration organized a similar exercise in Wujiang city in Suzhou area south of the Yangtze in east China's Jiangsu province, which lasted more than two hours.

The exercises will greatly help improve environmental departments' performance in handling unexpected accidents that may cause grave damage to the environment, administration officials said.

(Xinhua News Agency September 26, 2003)