SHANGHAI: Five officials have been punished for their failure to stop companies from discharging untreated sewage into Taihu Lake, where a massive algae outbreak left the people of Wuxi without tap water for a week earlier this month.

The five officials from Yixing, a county under the jurisdiction of Wuxi, an industrial and tourism city in East China's Jiangsu Province, were either removed or demoted on charges of dereliction of duty for allowing the companies to discharge wastewater into the lake.

The effluent is believed to have contributed to China's third largest freshwater lake becoming covered in a blanket of blue-green algae. The algae outbreak was also a result of last month's unusually warm weather and the low water level in the lake. It focused the local authority's attention on the need to clean up the polluted lake.