THE city's original plan to provide local residents water that is clean enough to drink directly from the tap by 2010 has met with more difficulties than expected.

"To reach that quality, water plants need to add an extra set of treatment facilities," said Fan Chen, an official with the Shanghai Municipal Water Affairs Bureau.

The deep treatment facilities - also known as ozone biological activated carbon processes - are widely used in Western countries, but are rare in China due to their huge cost.

The facilities can greatly help to reduce contaminants such as chlorine and bacteria in the water. Through the process both the taste and clarity of water undergoes obvious improvement.

"But the problem is that they are expensive," Fan said.

A series of reforms in recent years have separated all water plants from government management. Functioning more as self-managing enterprises than pure public utilities, the water plants no longer receive direct government subsidies. The low water rates in Shanghai presently mean that water plants, which are now more bottom-line oriented, have little incentive to spend large amounts updating their technology so long as their water meets the country's compulsory standard.

The Yangshupu Water Plant, mainly supplying water for residents in the Hongkou, Yangpu and Zhabei districts, is one of the very few in the city to have installed deep treatment facilities.

At a cost of 420 million yuan (US$50.6 million), the new facilities have the capacity to treat 360,000 tons of water daily. Although this is only a quarter of the overall volume the plant treats and supplies everyday, and around 1/20 of the city's total, it is an encouraging step in a city where popular demand for better water quality is strong.

A rough calculation made by the plant said that adding the extra process would increase the cost of treating a ton of water by at least

0.2 yuan (2.4 US cents). The installation of the facilities at Yangshupu is part of a co-operative undertaking with a government sponsored technical project, so the financial pressure on the water plant is diminished. For those plants without such government support, the sums required can be daunting, Fan said.

She also revealed that Shanghai Chengtou Corporation, the parent company of the water plants in urban areas, was working on a bill to be sent for review by the city's People's Congress on raising the water rate.

Pipe problems

However, would all the problems with Shanghai's tap water quality be settled if these facilities were installed?

"Of course not," said Xu Mei, an official with the Shanghai Water Supplying Office.

She said the problem with the tap water in Shanghai is complex. Apart from the lack of deep treatment facilities, the old pipeline network is also causing trouble.

The new facilities at the Yangshupu Water Plant will be put into operation at the end of the year, but as there are no pipes specially designed to carry this deep processed water, it will have to be mixed with ordinary water.

This problem will also face other water plants when they attempt to improve water quality by installing such new facilities. "The accompanying pipeline construction can be both time consuming and expensive, so it will not be accomplished anytime soon," Xu said.

The pipe problem doesn't stop there. It is reported that some drinking water pipes in Shanghai are more than 120 years ago. The length of the city's water pipes exceeds 500,000 kilometres, among which about 300 kilometres are older than 50 years. Some 800 kilometres are vulnerable to cracks and leaks, with 400 kilometres lacking the inner coatings required to prevent corroded pipes from contaminating the water.

The city has worked hard to replace old pipes. According to a recent story carried by the Shanghai Morning Post, the city has spent close to 1 billion yuan (US$120 million) over the past few years on the reconstruction of the pipeline network in residential quarters more than 50 years old. More such work will follow.

However, secondary pollution taking place on the way from water plant to tap is not just a piping problem. Water tanks and water pumps inside residential quarters are also causes, and these are the responsibility of property management companies.

"There is a rule stipulating that water tanks should be cleaned twice a year, but some managers are failing to do this and others are only doing it in a slipshod way," Xu said.

A man calling himself Shuishi Xia pasted a message on the BBS of his residential quarter, saying that a sample testing of the tap water in his home was "terrible, with a turbidity index 4.6 times the State standard". According to Xu Hongkai, a water plant technician, this was mainly caused by a polluted water tank.

Zhang Jiayi, director of the Shanghai Water Affairs Administrative Bureau, said the city will select eight different residential quarters for trials over the coming few years. One aim is to bring the whole water supply system - from water source, raw water treatment, water supply, water tanks to taps - under control of a single government sector, so that responsibilities will be clearer.

New standard

The city's plan, set out years ago, calls for Shanghai's tap water quality to reach US EPA standard or the present European Standard by 2010. By 2020, the water quality should reach the standard of developed countries in force at the same time. But according to Xu, this admirable goal could be very hard to achieve based on the limited progress made so far.

A more realistic objective would be for part of the city, mainly around the World Expo site, to have reached such a level by 2010, said a business insider who refused to reveal his name. But there are reasons to feel pessimistic even about this.

On June 1, the country issued a new standard for tap water quality, raising the number of indices to be tested from the current 36 to 101.

The new standard, coming amid growing concerns about water safety from the general public and worsening water pollution, has added some new items, including pesticides and organic pollutants, to its list of contaminants to be tested for in drinking water. Requirements concerning traditional items such as turbidity have been made three times more strict.

"The new standard was released very recently, and we are still working on the ways to apply all the new tests, but one thing is certain: The new standard is much stricter about water sources," Fan said.