Months of illegal sand-digging have transformed the once flat ground of Beijing's largest reservoir into ravines, directly threatening the water quality of the wellheads and one fifth of the city's water supply, according to the Beijing News.

The paper reported Friday that the water source, consisting of 36 wellheads around the converge of Chaobai River in the northeast suburb, supplies water for the Eighth Waterworks of Beijing.

The waterworks provides 370,000 cubic meters of living water, one fifth of the city's total living water supply, to about two million residents every day. It covers 175 square kilometers in the southeast part of Beijing.

The once flat ground around the reservoir has become a ravine, 40 meters deep, 10 kilometers long and two kilometers wide, with wellheads and high voltage poles towering in between. Some wellheads are almost tottering without sand around the walls, and some high voltage poles have been felled.

"The situation is pressing," said Zhang Houli, the senior engineer at the waterworks. "Without sand protection, pollutants are easily filtered into the underground water when it rains or living sewage flows into the ravine from the villages nearby."

Sand loss around the water source was widely reported by the media three years ago, and the illegal activities were checked for a while, Zhang said. Sand-diggers returned several months later, however, and the destruction has been deteriorating ever since.

Beijing's Eighth Waterworks has taken various measures to protect the land, including building stone dikes around the wellheads and high voltage poles, forbidding the sand-diggers to set up illegal erections, but all the efforts were ignored or defeated by the sand-diggers.

Residents said the high-quality sand around the reservoir attracted the illegal sand-diggers, most of whom are from outside Beijing. They usually work at night and transport sand by trucks. They can make profits of more than 10,000 yuan (US$1,200) per night.

High voltage poles were felled five times and water pipelines broken 23 times by the sand-diggers in the last six months alone, according the waterworks' records. As a result, it was forced to suspend the water supply four times during the period, with the latest suspension lasting 11 hours.

According to the measure on the protection of underground water sources issued by the municipal government, water sources should be surrounded by several protecting obstacles and their management be supervised by the local government.

"There are various reasons behind the current situation," Zhang said, hoping that departments concerned would pay attention to the problem and solve it as soon as possible.
 
(Xinhua News Agency November 6, 2004)