Chinese officials face-savers or killers?

Re Spill in China Brings Danger, and Cover-Up, by Jim Yardley, New York Times, November 26, 2005:

This front-page, top-of-the-fold story fails to address a central issue.

An explosion occurs at a chemical factory in China. An estimated 100 tons of benzene and nitrobenzene pours into a river which provides most of the water for Harbin, a major metropolis that's home to millions.

Chinese officials attempt a cover-up. They shut down the municipal water system, but announce that the reason is to conduct routine repairs on pipes. The cover-up is exposed, and everyone sees how wrong and foolish it was.

But this story neglects a central issue: What were the consequences of the cover-up? There are two obvious, alternative possibilities:

• The cover-up sought to conceal errors already made, but did not itself directly threaten anyone's health.

• The cover-up stopped critical information from reaching people, who as a result drank poisonous water.

This is an important and newsworthy distinction, since the latter implies a far greater degree of reckless criminality.

The article offers a hint of the latter:

"They were trying to lie and get by," Qi Guangzhong, 64, said as he walked on a promenade beside the brown waters of the [river] on Friday. "The government wanted to hide this." [...] Mr. Qi said he had first learned of the explosion by watching a Shanghai television station. "People are angry," he said. "The consequences could have been grave if people had started drinking the water and dying."

Could that have been a consequence of the lies? Or did the water shutdown prevent anyone from consuming poisonous water? The Times provides no resolution of the question.