China's Drinking Water Situation Grim; Heavy Pollution to Blame.
(China is on a timetable for the Olympics, a sense of urgency)
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At a July 25 national meeting on legal enforcement of the protection of drinking water sources, China's environmental authorities concluded that the country's water quality situation remains grim, according to People's Daily. Officials with the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), which organized the meeting, noted that industrial pollution accidents have been the major culprit behind poor drinking water safety in recent years.
Currently, more than 300 million rural residents, nearly a quarter of China's total population, lack access to clean drinking water. A monthly report on water quality released by China National Environmental Monitoring Center in June showed that drinking water quality in 16 out of 113 key cities assessed was below national standards. Of drinking water sources, 74, or 20.1 percent of the total surveyed, fell short of quality requirements, while 527 million tons of drinking water, or 32.3 percent of the total, was unsuitable for drinking.
Critical drinking water sources, such as rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers, have been increasingly threatened by industrial pollution. In 2005, SEPA received reports of 76 pollution incidents nationwide, many of which took their tolls on water bodies that provide both rural and urban drinking water. The most serious accident, the contamination of northeast China's Songhua River last November, was caused by an explosion at a petrochemical plant upstream and cut off the drinking water supply of 3.8 million people for four days. With memories of the Songhua incident still fresh, SEPA tackled another 86 pollution incidents in the first half of 2006.
And more threats are lurking. The 2005-06 national environmental safety overhaul found that of 7,555 chemical and petrochemical projects surveyed, 1,354 were located on the banks and shores of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs; 2,489 were adjacent to cities or areas with high population concentrations; 535 were on major tributaries of key rivers; and 280 were on the upper reaches of drinking water source protection regions. According to estimates, more than 13,000 petrochemical factories out of the national total of 21,000 were built along the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, two of China's major water arteries. Most such factories lack strict environmental protection measures, and the consequences of future spills or other accidents would be devastating.
SEPA hopes to change this. At the July 25 meeting, Deputy Director Zhang Lijun claimed that the administration would tighten its supervision of polluting sources and wastewater discharge channels in areas harboring drinking water sources. In addition, China will soon revise its national compulsory standards on drinking water quality under the joint efforts of the Standardization Administration of China, the Ministry of Construction, and the Ministry of Health. The current standards, issued in 1985 before widespread industrialization took place in China, have only 35 indices for testing. The new regulation will increase that number to 107, covering organic pollutants and other substances caused by industrial pollution.