Fishermen's loss

The chemical spill, one of the worst in the country, took heavy tolls on local fishermen.

Huang Youping started to invest in fish farming in 2010 after years of fishing in the Longjiang, like others who live along the riverbank.

"My fish are about 7 to 10 cm long, smaller and younger than others' fish," he said. That's why the nightmare - he lost 5,000 fish - hit him earlier than his peers.

"The incident has already caused me the loss of some 40,000 yuan ($6,300)," he said. "I have a family with a dozen mouths to feed, and besides, I must pay high school tuition fees for my two sons."

His neighbor, Huang Jianping, said he lost everything. "In previous years, I only maintained hundreds of fish in the net, but I decided to speculate and raise the number to several thousand last year," he said. "The decision wiped me out."

Yizhou has prohibited all fishing activities and the sale of fish farmed in the tainted river.

According to Xinhua News Agency, fish farms from Liujiang and Liucheng, two downstream counties right before the Longjiang joins the Liujiang River, have banned selling fish from the river.

"It makes us suddenly have nothing to do but loiter around," Huang Chaoxin, 35, said as he pointed at the government notice pasted in his neighborhood in Desheng, Yizhou.

He, Huang Jianping and Huang Youping were mobilized to bury a batch of floating dead fish. "We had to dig a coffin shape in the ground to bury thousands of fish," said Huang Jianqiang, 46. "We dug it 2 meters deep, as it was far more stinky than people can stand."

Even more fish were floating under the nearly frozen surface, but the fishermen said they had done enough.

Huang Chaoxin said the six fishing families in his group expect a collective loss of 400,000 yuan.

Authorities in Hechi, where the sources of cadmium contamination were found, issued a range of figures last week. They said more than 40,000 kilograms of fish were found dead by Thursday, and that more than 230 households living by the river have been affected.

Farmers harvest sugar cane adjacent to Lalang hydroelectric station. Jiang Dong / China Daily