Yang Jinhui is living in worry inside the cracked walls of his
neighbor's house while he awaits a government solution to the
rebuilding of his house, which collapsed a year ago due to
subsidence.
"Nearly all the houses in our village have cracks," said Yang, a
farmer from a village severely affected by subsidence in Lingshi
County, north China's Shanxi Province, the country's number one coal
producer.
Like Yang, nearly one million people across the province have
been affected by subsidence, the drying-up of underground water and
other ecological disasters in the past couple of decades. As coal
mine owners gobble up profits, the price of excessive mining is
dear.
Over half of the original 530 residents in Taoniu village, where
Yang lives, have moved from the land on which they can no longer
grow a sufficient amount of crops.
"All the fruit trees have died and farm produce has been
dramatically reduced due to water shortages," said Yang. "Our
drinking water has to be piped from a village ten kilometers away
as the wells in our village dried up seven years ago."
The underground water resources in the area have almost run out
as a consequence of heavy mining.
"The area of sinking land is increasing by 94 square kilometers
per year in Shanxi," said Wang Hongying, head of the energy
economics institute of the Shanxi Academy of Social Sciences.
The province reported that 2,940 square kilometers of land was
subsiding in 2004.
The subsidence has caused tragic accidents such as the land
collapse near a coal mine in Ningwu County in Shanxi last August,
which killed 18 miners. There have also been reports of farm
animals falling down crevices when ploughing the land in
subsidence-affected areas.
Experts attribute the increase of subsidence to the province's
booming mining industry, which now produces more than 500 million
tons of coal per year, a quarter of the country's total.
The province has launched a three-year treatment plan for nine
key sinking areas, with an investment of 6.8 billion yuan (US$870
million).
The plan aims to solve housing problems by 2008 for
subsidence-affected residents, including repairing slightly damaged
buildings and building new homes for those living in severely
damaged ones.
"But the plan does not address the drying-up of underground
water resources and worsening ecological situation," said Jing
Shan, an official in charge of the subsidence treatment in
Lingshi.
"Coal mining enterprises should establish special funds from the
production costs to compensate for the damaged environment," Jing
said.
(Xinhua News Agency January 13, 2007)
