PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 22 July, 2015, 5:23pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 22 July, 2015, 5:44pm
Gloria Chan gloria.chan@scmp.com
Public housing resident Lau Kwok-lim uses a filter in his Tak Long Estate flat. The government wants to give filters to all those affected, but it must determine they are effective at removing lead.
The government plans to give filters to residents of public housing estates affected by excessive lead levels once it can determine which model will be effective at removing the heavy metal.
Secretary for Transport and Housing Professor Anthony Cheung Bing-leung told the housing panel of the Legislative Council at a special meeting this morning that the government still needed to determine which filter to distribute.
“If we can find qualified filters, we will arrange them for affected estates,” Cheung said, after Civic Party lawmaker Alan Leong Ka-kit asked whether filters could be distributed to residents as the quickest way to ease their concerns over elevated lead levels in their tap water.
The special meeting came after the government announced that 40 people out of 302 tested were found to have “slightly higher than normal” levels of lead in their blood. Of them, 27 are children younger than six and 13 are breastfeeding mothers. They are all from the Kai Ching estate in Kowloon City and the Kwai Luen estate in Kwai Chung.
Both pan-democratic and pro-Beijing politicians criticised the government’s slow response and called for full-scale water tests in all public housing estates in Hong Kong.
“We need a timetable for public housing estates’ water tests in order to either calm residents or solve the problem as soon as possible,” said lawmaker Kwok Wai-keung. “Is the government afraid of finding out more cases and getting overloaded from large-scale tests?”
Lawmakers such as Democrat Wong Pik-wan, who exposed the lead problem in the Kai Ching estate’s water more than two weeks ago, called for blood tests for all residents in the affected estates.
Fellow Democrat Wu Chi-wai’s motion to set up a select committee in Legco to inquire into the contaminated water scare lost by an 8-10 vote.
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/1842806/hong-kong-government-plans-give-filters-those
