HKSQ Seminar on Quality Water Supply from Source to Home

The seminar entitled “Quality Water Supply from Source to Home” was organized by Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) and co-organized with ASQ, BCH Dept., & SEEM Dept., CityU on 1^st Feb 2016.  Hong Kong had just celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the supply of Dongjiang water to this Pearl of the East.  Incidentally, quality of in drinking water in the recent months had aroused attention of various stakeholders in Hong Kong.  The seminar aimed to share the background of Dongjiang water and discussed the quality issues.  In the beginning, Dr. KS Chin (Former Chairman, HKSQ; Associate Professor, SEEM Dept., CityU) took a photo with speaker Dr. Richard Cheung (Associate Professor, BCH Dept., CityU) for memory.

Dr. KS Chin introduced the guest speaker’s background. Dr. Richard Cheung is a member of Advisory Committee on the Quality of Water Supplies and Resources established by the Water Supplies Department of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. He is also a member of the Steering Committee for the "Quality Restaurant Environmental Management Scheme" funded by the Environmental Conservation Fund.

Firstly, Dr. Richard Cheung said that Dong Jiang Water was the major source of Hong Kong’s water supply which upto 70% to 80% of our drinking water.  

Then he showed the map to explain Dong Jiang water come from Xinfengjiang Reservoir to Taijuan Pumping Station and then through the closed aqueduct (Red color line) to Shenzhen Reservoir.  Hong Kong draw water from Muk Wu Pumping Station.

  

The Closed Aqueduct passed different mountains through many pumping system to supply Hong Kong.  It is a great engineering work.

After briefing the source, Dr. Cheung introduced the Water Supplies Department (WSD) website in which contained much information such as WHO guidelines for Drinking water Quality as follows:

Part A – Microbiological quality

Part B – Chemicals of health significance as described by WHO’s Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality (WHO 2011)

Part C – Radiological quality

Part D – Other parameters

Recently quality issue of drinking water was happened in Consumer part.  The following diagram showed the first part was responsible by Water Authority and the second part was responsible by Agent and the last part was responsible by consumers.  But the recently problem was by Housing Department because of public house.

  

Based on Centre for Health Protection advice, we had better run water for 2 to 3 minutes prior to using it form drinking and food preparation.  However, Dr. Cheung said if seldom people would use NSF 53 standard water because the water flow was too slow. 

Lastly, Dr. Cheung arose several challenges for Quality Personnel below for discussion.

a)      Hardware (various parts of the plumbing system)

b)      Personnel training and supervision of procedure during construction

c)      Testing and Certification of the finally completed plumbing system

d)     Routine testing of Water Quality

Q&A

During the discussion, I said that I had measured city & rural area’s air participates (20 years ago) which contained lead in 0.158µg/m^3 and 0.114µg/m^3, respectively.

Minda had asked Doctor (specialist for children) who said most of pregnant woman would like to eat more fish than normal.  Sea fish contained much more lead. So lead could be come from food.

At end of the seminar, Dr. KS Chin (Former Chairman, HKSQ) presented a souvenir to Dr. Richard Cheung.

Reference:

HKSQ - www.hksq.org

BCH Dept., CityU – http://www6.cityu.edu.hk/bhdbapp/deptweb/index.html

SEEM Dept., CityU – http://www.cityu.edu.hk/seem/