Society
Illegal metallurgy plants destroyed
By Bao Daozu (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-01-27 08:56
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Two underground metallurgy plants hidden in a remote valley in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, were destroyed yesterday.
Local law-enforcement departments took swift action after a Guangzhou Daily report revealed the existence of an illegal workshop yesterday. And law enforcement workers found another and bigger metallurgy plant on the site and bulldozed both of them yesterday afternoon.
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The Guangzhou Daily ran a story about the underground workshop yesterday, which attracted wide attention and led to a swift response from the local government.
The Nanwan subdistrict office, together with the Shenzhen Dongshen Water Resource Protection Office, the city's environmental protection bureau and market supervision administration, sent law enforcement workers to the site to check the illegal workshop.
Besides the reported workshop in shacks, they found another metallurgy plant, much larger.
Workers from the Shenzhen Industrial Waste Treatment Station found no hydrides-like wastes in the waste water from the sites but did find concentrated nitric acid, sulphuric acid and hydrochloric acid at the site.
A deputy director with the Dongshen Office of Water Sources, surnamed Huang, told reporters: "There is no authorized metallurgy plant in Shenzhen and all such waste should be treated by the city's industrial waste treatment station."
"The waste water was not discharged into the drainage ditch, and thus won't pose a direct threat to the environment. And the wastewater intercepting and discharge project can prevent precipitation and wastewater from directly flowing into the reservoir."
"But there is potential threat to the reservoir," Huang said.
Reporters found that concentrated acids spotted at the site were highly erodent. Splashes of the acids corroded nearby trees as the reporter tried to test its acidity. Nearby forestation is also affected by gasified acids and waste gas produced in the processing.
The work team maneuvered special-purpose vehicles to collect the acids and demolish the temporary sheds.
Deputy chief of the sub-district's law enforcement team, surnamed Luo, said such cases have been detected previously but facilities hiding in this mountainous region are hard to detect. Moreover, the facilities of these illegal plants are quite flexible; they can be disassembled and set up quite easily and at low cost.
This region is also between two local communities, which means that regular patrols and law enforcement officers don't reach this region thoroughly.
The sub-district officials told reporters that they will probe further into these cases and destroy all the illegally constructed facilities. They promised that more efforts will be made to prevent similar cases from happening and expressed their gratitude for the supervisory efforts from the media.
Surrounding this valley are Level 2 water sources protection zones.
This illegal plant is situated 1.08 km away from the Shenzhen reservoir, which provides 70 percent of the drinking water for Hong Kong residents.
Gao Jing from Guangzhou Daily contributed to the story
