Zhuhai in Guangdong Province and the Macao Special
Administrative Region (SAR) are under threat from a serious
saltwater tide that is likely to worsen over the next two months,
the provincial water resource department said Thursday.
The saltwater tide arrived in Zhuhai in the first half of
November, earlier than the usual saltwater tide season from
December to February.
Last month, the city's main water source, Pinggang Water Pumping
Station, was rendered incapable of pumping qualified fresh water
for 171 hours. This seriously affected Zhuhai people's daily lives,
and the impact extended throughout the Pearl River Delta.
Currently, the whole city has stores of 25 million cu m of fresh
water, 7 million cu m less than the same period last year.
Director of the Guangdong provincial water resource department
Huang Boqing said the department and other relevant organizations
would do their best to control the saltwater tides and increase the
amount of fresh water.
Huang said construction of hydropower stations in the upper
reaches of Xijiang and Beijang rivers - two tributaries of the
Pearl River - should be slowed down, because they would block a
large amount of fresh water and worsen saltwater tides in the
river's lower reaches.
Other provinces in the river's upper reaches diverted about 10
million cu m of fresh water to Zhuhai from November 20 to December
4.
In addition, Zhuhai would complete a large reservoir by next
October, and construction of another would begin next year and
finish in 2010.
However, many individuals are dredging river sands from the
Pearl River Delta for profits, causing the riverbed to lower.
"The riverbed of Beijiang River is 30 percent lower than two
decades ago," He Zhibo, a senior engineer of Zhujiang (Pearl River)
water resource commission, told China Daily Thursday.
The lowered riverbed cannot buffer saltwater tides. And if the
river sand dredging continues, all government efforts to stem the
tides would be wasted, he said.
(China Daily December 7, 2007)
