Hong Khan.
The first is a huge block of land in Hong Kong’s central business district where there were no public housing developments in recent years.
“Most of the housing buildings on the island were built in the 1960s and 70s at a time when there were no cars on our streets,” said Lee Ho-man, a spokesman for China’s land registration division.
“Because of their size, they tend to leak,” he added. “It has become a major leak point for leakage of groundwater and groundwater is leaking into the water.”
A second spill-place is an old industrial estate in the eastern quarter of Hong Kong, where hundreds of tons of industrial wastewater has flowed into a pond.
A third is a site on Fau Tong, a high-level waterway, where the city’s sewage treatment system has been overwhelmed by the massive volume of untreated sewage dumped from the four apartment buildings on Fau Tong, leaving deep deposits of raw sewage on the ground.
Many other leaks are thought to be in Hong Kong’s groundwater systems, often due to flooding caused when stormwater enters the system, as well as from rainfall.
Hong Kong is the only large city in Asia where it is not possible to test the groundwater to determine whether it is contaminated.
“We have to make big investments when it comes to improving the water system,” said Huang Yi-ling, head of water administration at the Hong Kong Water Service, who added that only 15 percent of China’s drinking water is considered safe.
Even that number is likely to grow because water has become almost free of pollutants due to the construction of many cities as well as development in places such as Los Angeles.
As a result Hong Kong is likely to be exposed to a lot of harmful water pollution from Beijing and other cities and areas for many more years to come, Huang said. “There are huge amounts of pollution in Shanghai and Beijing on many rivers and in lakes and fish will die.”
But with the city preparing to host the opening ceremony of the 2022 World Cup finals in 2022, Huang said it was about to start focusing.
“Even if we are talking about 40 years from now we have to start cleaning up water to improve public health.”
© Thomson Reuters 2015