The government should do more to improve water quality on outlying islands, including Kinmen and Penghu, the Environmental Pro-tection Administration (EPA) said yesterday in response to a recent survey that showed high levels of nitrogen and calcium carbonate in the islands' water.
According to the EPA's latest nationwide survey on the quality of drinking water, 28 percent of the samples of tap water in Kinmen and 1.58 percent of those in Penghu failed to meet national standards.
"Taiwan Water Supply Corp should be held responsible, because all samples of tap water were collected along its water supply network," Ho Soon-ching (何舜琴), director-general of the Bureau of Environmental Sanitation and Toxic Chemicals Control, said yesterday at a press conference.
Ho said the EPA had reviewed proposals on improving water quality that had been compiled by two water treatment plants in Penghu and Kinmen. The EPA wants to solve the existing problems on these two islands by the end of next year and 2005 respectively.
Officials said the steps that are to be taken to improve water quality include removing plants in reservoirs, building sewers and desalinating seawater to increase water supplies.
Most of the substandard samples point to worsening nitrogen contamination, which is a result of the lack of sewage treatment facilities, officials said.
In the survey, 10,454 samples of tap water and 821 samples taken from other sources of drinking water were collected in the first 10 months of this year.
Tests showed that 404 of the 821 samples collected from groundwater reserves and springs in remote areas failed to meet the national standard, making the rate of substandard samples 49.75 percent. Most of these were contaminated by Escherichia coli.
"To ensure public health, we strongly urge residents of remote areas who rely on spring water or simple water purification systems not to drink water without first boiling it," Ho said.
Eric Liou (劉銘龍), secretary-general of the Environmental Quality Protection Foundation (環境品質文教基金會), said that the government should do more to improve water quality on outlying islands, like it did for residents of Kaohsiung.
The government budgeted NT$15 billion in 2001 to move intake points along the Kaoping River upstream and build three advanced treatment plants.
According to the EPA, water quality in Kaohsiung has been significantly improved since the project was completed in October. The average level of water hardness, or the amount of calcium carbonate, in the samples that had been collected in the first ten months of this year was 228ppm, whereas the level in 52 samples collected last month was only 162ppm.
Liou said that the deteriorating water quality on Kinmen could be partly attributed to increasing human activities relating to tourism.
"The lack of appropriate treatment facilities dealing with increasing household sewerage led to contamination involving nitrogen and ammonia in the water," Liou said.
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