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EPA head visits polluted industrial site in Tainan

It will be impossible to clean up a polluted industrial site in Tainan, Minister of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Chang Kuo-lung (張國龍) said yesterday, and the best thing the government will be able to do is adopt innovative technologies to stop the pollution from spreading.

Chang visited a site that was polluted by chemicals discharged by the state-run Taiwan Alkali Industrial Corp (TAIC) from 1942 to 1982, to investigate the expanding pollution in the soil and water.

In 1983, TAIC was merged with state-run China Petrochemical Development Corp, which inherited all land used by TAIC. However, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, which supervises state-run corporations, failed to investigate soil and water pollution at the site, and residents were never informed of the danger of eating fish and oysters grown in fish farms and ponds nearby.

Local environmental experts and activists have urged the government to shoulder responsibility for that oversight.

On Monday, the ministry finally decided to allocate NT$1.3 billion (US$41 million) for affected residents living near the polluted site.

When talking with five victims, Chang said that the government will do its best to ensure local people's rights.

"The money will be used in the next five years to pay for health care, social welfare, and stipends to support living expenses. In addition, an environmental investigation will be completed soon as basic information for future treatment," Chang said.

According to the EPA, an ongoing comprehensive environmental investigation will be completed by the end of next month. At that time, EPA officials will have a clear picture about the precise area of polluted land and how serious the pollution is.

Meanwhile, the EPA will assist the Tainan City Government in dredging nearby rivers which have been polluted by dioxin, mercury, and other chemicals.

The site began to draw attention after a health survey was released last year suggesting that dioxin levels in the blood of 14 residents living near the polluted site greatly exceeded the maximum recommended level.

Astonishingly, the blood dioxin concentration in one woman was about 15 times the recommended level. Seven members of the woman's family have died from cancer, after eating fish caught from a polluted pond near the factory for more than two decades without receiving any warning from the government.

EPA officials said that China Petrochemical, which was privatized in 1994, should shoulder the responsibility for treatment projects and remediation plans.

But environmental activists said a longer-term government plan was needed.

"We are looking forward to long-term governmental projects that will thoroughly solve pollution problems. The EPA should not only set up new regulations regarding pollution treatment, but also promote environmental forensics, the science of determining pollution sources," Wu Tung-jye (吳東傑), chairman of the Green Formosa Front, a Taipei-based environmental group, told the Taipei Times.
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