That is having a major impact on national health. No one from the area has been healthy enough in recent years to qualify for the People's Liberation Army. Two years ago, the government abruptly announced that the water from the 4,300-km Huaihe River, of which the Hei is a tributary, was unsafe to consume, which left 1 million people along the river's banks without drinking water. The military had to truck in water for a month while officials figured out what to do. An alarming number of rivers and lakes in eastern Europe are ecologically dead or dangerously polluted.
Supply is sometimes an issue as well.
Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, ran critically low on water in 1995, and in the year it took to build a new pipeline, citizens sometimes could turn on their taps only every second or third day. Eastern Europe has been the scene of a landmark legal dispute over the construction of a dam. In 1992, Slovakia, then a province of Czechoslovakia but now an independent nation, ignored objections from international conservationists and put into operation the Gabcikovo Dam on the Danube River along the border with Hungary. The Hungarians had been participants in the project, which provides electricity to the region, but pulled out in 1989 after opposition by environmentalists became a focal point of the country's democracy movement. In 1993 the two sides agreed to refer the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.