Kaohsiung County demands inspection of all waste dumps

Members of the county assembly in the southern county and lawmakers elected from the region asked the Cabinet-level Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) and the Council of Agriculture (COA) to help conduct a thorough investigation into all legal and illegal dump sites which contain industrial wastes to safeguard people's health.

Those of the ruling Kuomintang said the Kaohsiung County Government should also initiate more actions to rid industrial pollution through tighter monitoring. They said that the slaughtering of close to 10,000 ducks contaminated with dioxin at an illegal landfill site containing industrial waste in Daliao township demonstrated the malfeasance of local officials who should be fully aware of the threats from pollution hazards in the industrial county.

KMT legislators said they have invited senior officials from the EPA, the COA and the Department of Health to give a report next Monday on their measures to deal with the problems and follow-up administration plans.

Their colleagues in the opposition Democratic Progressive Party said the chiefs of all these three agencies should step down to take responsibility for the dioxin contamination in the ducks, which could cause cancer for those consuming the ducks. No just the ducks, even fish and pineapples from the tainted areas have been supplied to consumers for years, they said.

KMT lawmakers said the DPP should help deal with the problems directly by taking active and effective actions instead of turning the event into a political issue. They said the DPP has been the running Kaohsiung County for decades and local officials should be held responsible for ignoring the illegal operations of raising ducks, fish and fruit on unauthorized industrial dumping grounds.

The EPA made public yesterday the locations of all seven landfills of steel mill slag and other industrial wastes in the Daliao area. Five sites have been left vacant while one was used to grow pineapples and the other for raising ducks and fish. EPA officials said samples were gathered from all seven sites for thorough testing. The duck raiser will be fined for the illegal operation while the agency will work with the county government to nail down companies that unloaded their wastes at the sites, they said.

The EPA uncovered a total of 175 illegal landfills throughout Taiwan in an islandwide survey in 2001 with 21 in the category of severe contamination, they explained. But the seven sites found in Daliao were new ones created by illegal industrial operators while the duck farmers had used one of the sites by violating the regulations in the absence of adequate supervision of local authorities. The officials said the EPA has already started a new sweeping survey of illegal landfills around the island earlier this year.

Executives and inspectors at the Kaohsiung branch of Taiwan Water Co. said test results show the level of dioxin in Fengshan Reservoir, which helps supply water to industrial enterprises and household use in the greater Kaohsiung area, is far below the hazardous limit.

An official at a duck raisers association said the latest dioxin case did not have a severe impact on duck prices mainly because it was an independent case and the affected ducks were confined to one single farm.

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