VietNamNet Bridge – Spending billions of dong to buy villas at high grade residential quarters, but thousands of households at five residential quarters in districts 8 and Binh Chanh in HCM City still have to live in serious pollution.
Spending multi-billion dong to receive bad odors

The Binh Hung waste water treatment plant, which was built in an aim to keep the environment clean, turns out to be the environment polluter. The plant gives terrible smell, threatening the daily life of thousands of households.

In fact, local residents have been living together with the pollution over the last year already. One year ago, they lodged complaints about the terrible smell to local authorities. However, no improvement has been made so far, while the Binh Hung waste water treatment plant has not taken any actions to settle the problem.

As the pollution has become unbearably serious, more than 100 households flocked to the Binh Hung plant on June 26 to express their protest, causing big noise in the area.

Ngo Thien Kim, who lives at Dai Phuc residential quarter, said that she spent billions of dong to buy land, villas and houses here to be able to enjoy good landscape and breathe fresh air, not to receive the terrible smell.

“No one could imagine before that a waste water treatment plant would be located next to the residential quarters. The thing that you meet first every day when you get up is the terrible odor,” she said.

Nguyen Thanh Son, a local resident, complained that he always suffers headache because of the terrible smell. Meanwhile, children and old people, who stay at home all the day, are the biggest sufferers.

The residential quarter project developers have also complained that their business has been performing badly because of the waste water treatment plant. A lot of people contacted the investors to buy apartments or villas here, but they have left after hearing about the smell.

The air pollution in the area has badly affected the business of real estate developers. Real estate developers have to spend multi-billion of dong to build modern infrastructure and provide modern material facilities to attract people. However, their investments prove to be in vain.

Temporary solution applied, long term solution not found

On May 31, Ly Tho Dac, Deputy Director of MTV Water Drainage Company in HCM City, sent a document to the city’s authorities and relevant branches, defending the Binh Hung plant in the case of discharging bad odor to the environment.

According to Dac, Binh Hung plant is a part of the project on improving the water environment in HCM City, which is in charge of treating the waste water from four districts of the city with the total population of 425,000 people.

Dac said that the company has been using some bio-products to ease the terrible smell, but this has not helped much. It is now the rainy season, when the air temperature levels inside and outside the plant are different, paving the way for the arising polluted air to escape to the environment.

He also said that the input organic substance content has been increasing, thus leading to the higher organic substance content in the mud generated after the water processing. This is also a reason behind the increase of the bad odor.

The waste water treatment plant has promised to apply some temporary measures to minimize the bad odor. However, the promise has not satisfied local residents, who said that this is just a temporary solution, while they need long term solution.

Source: Lao dong