KMT Taipei City Councilor Chiang Nai-shin (蔣乃辛) yesterday questioned the quality of water at hot springs in Taipei's Peitou area, saying that one fifth of Peitou's hot springs might be fake hot springs water.
"The volume of the hot spring water provided by the Taipei Water Department is only 5,800 tonnes per day, while the total consumption of hot springs water in Peitou is around 30,000 tonnes per day. It is really hard for the public to determine between genuine and fake spring water when they are bathing," Chiang said yesterday at a press conference.
Citing public complaints, Chiang indicated some of the hot springs' proprietors did not provide natural hot spring water and instead used other processed ways to deceive the public, including recycling the hot spring water, using the stored hot spring water, diluting the natural hot spring, and making synthesized hot spring water with hot spring powder.
"All these tricks are used by some unlawful proprietors simply because there isn't enough natural hot springs water. Some proprieters even recycle used hot springs water. Some consumers told us that there was even toilet paper coming out from the hot springs water pipe," Chiang said.
"If the public has to bathe in that kind of hot spring, why not just bathe at home," Chiang said.
According to Taipei City's Department of Health's annual hot spring water quality examination in Peitou, 21.14 percent of the hot springs proprietors failed to pass the water quality test in 2001, while 23.53 failed last year.
"Some of the public hot springs bath rooms owned by the city government didn't even qualify," the city councilor said.
However, the director of Peitou Hot Springs Development Association Hsu Chian-chang (許健藏) yesterday denied the city councilor's accusations, saying it was unfair to implicate all of the area's hot springs proprietors.
"I know in Hsin Peitou (新北投), all 22 proprietors bought hot spring water from the Taipei Water Department. It's not possible for them to have provided fake or recycled hot spring water," he said.
Because there isn't a law which clearly regulates the hot springs industry, the city's Department of Health, Taipei Water Department, and the Bureau of Transportation share responsibilities of assessing the quality of water at the springs.
An official from the Consumers' Foundation Huang Yu-sheng (
Officials of the transportation bureau said yesterday the agency had established a Hot Spring Management Taskforce and budgeted about NT$30 million for the taskforce.
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