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Crash Drought Water Program*
June 23, 2001
China Announces Extensive Plan to Combat Its Water Shortage
By ERIK ECKHOLM
EIJING, June 22 The Chinese government has announced details
of a crash, multibillion-dollar plan it hopes will salvage the deteriorating
water supply here, which along with other northern cities has suffered from
years of unusually low rainfall and decades of unchecked pollution and poorly
planned development.
The plan includes construction of new sewage-treatment plants, the closing
of polluting factories, changes in farming practices and graduated pricing
of water. It aims to ease the water shortage before Beijing can benefit from
another grandiose project to pipe water from the Yangtze River basin
in southern China to the north.
Beijing sits on a plain without large rivers or high rainfall and as its
population surged past 14 million, with little conservation, shortages were
perhaps inevitable. Urban water needs have soared while the surrounding region
has thousands of factories that are polluters and heavy water users and large
farming areas that rely on irrigation. Pollution, as much as skimpy supply,
has been blamed for the immediate crisis because much water has been rendered
unusable.
Until recently, Beijing drew its drinking water from two reservoirs. But
since 1997, pollution has forced the city to stop using one of those reservoirs,
at Guanting, said Zhang Jiyao, deputy minister of water resources. To
make up the deficit, Beijing has resorted to overpumping of underground
waters, Mr. Zhang said.
Sewage services have not remotely kept up with the city's growth. Choked
by sewage and factory effluents, some river channels here have become virtual
cesspools. Only 22 percent of wastewater in greater Beijing is now treated,
but officials said the rapid construction of new sewage treatment plants
will bring that number to 90 percent by 2005.
With a top-level national coordinating group and a projected 2005 budget
of nearly $3 billion most of it to be provided by the Beijing city
government officials insist that things will change rapidly. "This
plan will turn Beijing into an international city with guaranteed water sources
and a beautiful water environment," Mr. Zhang pledged, no doubt with the
city's pending bid for the 2008 Olympics in mind.
The project aims to restore the Guanting reservoir while improving protection
and augmenting flows into the other key source, the Miyun reservoir. Already,
irrigation has been stopped in large areas formerly devoted to rice paddies,
and water- conserving farm methods will be introduced upstream while other
areas are restored to forest and grassland.
Officials offered no details of how they would meet the huge cost
of building so many plants and hooking up sprawling communities to the main
sewerage system.
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