When water “attacks” the city
According to Luu Duc Cuong, Director of the Center for Urban and Rural Area Research and Programing, the development of the water drainage system in HCM City still cannot catch up with the urbanization progress. Meanwhile, the climate changes and sea water rise have not got appropriate attention state agencies when programming the urban development.
Therefore, urban flooding has become a more serious problem to HCM City.
In 2008, HCM City authorities built up a plan to fight against the flooding which aimed to gradually settle the flooding caused by high tides and control the upstream floods. The plan to build a dyke system from Suc Station to Kinh Lo River with 13 tide control portals, the plan to upgrade the canals and the plan to build water reservoirs were also drawn up.
A lot of projects have been carried out to improve the quality of the environment in HCM City, including the one on improving the environment in Nhieu Loc – Thi Nghe – Tau Hu – Ben Nghe, and Tan Hoa – Lo Gom have been implemented. The city has also run the projects on preventing floods in the inner city’s areas, such as the Tham Luong – Ben Cat project.
According to the HCM City Steering Committee on implementing the action plan to deal with the climate changes, in 2011-2015, the city would carry out 30 projects to deal with the scenario of 75 centimeter sea water rise. With this scenario, the city’s flooded area would be 204 square kilometers, which would directly affect 154 out of the 322 wards and communes.
Four fields would be prioritized to receive investments, including the water resources, energy, waste management and the land resources management. It is estimated that the projects would cost more than 4 trillion dong.
The projects on fighting against the flooding have brought initial results. The number of inundated points in the central area of the city has decreased from 221 in 2008 to 40 in 2011. However, the number of inundated points tends to increase in the suburb areas.
HCM City, whose name is in the list of the 10 cities in the world that would suffer most from the climate changes. Therefore, experts say, if the city does not begin taking actions right now to deal with the climate changes, it would be likely that the city would get inundated under the water in the future.
A research by ICEM, a center for environment management, shows that by 2050, about 30-70 percent of the HCM City’s traffic system would be in the danger of getting flooded, while 70 percent of the land area for agriculture production would suffer from salinity.
Besides, 50 percent of the surface and underground water supply plants, 60 percent of waste water treatment plants and 90 percent of the rubbish dumps would be inundated.
Urban development program needs to get adapted to climate changes
It is obvious that 70 percent of the urban land area in HCM City is located at two meters lower than the sea water level. Meanwhile, the rapid urbanization process in recent years has led to the fact that thousands of hectares of water containing land have disappeared.
As the number of urban dwellers increases rapidly, people tend to fill in the canals and lakes to get land for building houses. In the last 10 years alone, 47 canals with the total area of 16.4 hectares disappeared. The Binh Tien reservoir, 7.4 hectares, which is one of the most important water reservoirs in the city, has been filled.
Just within a short period from 2002 to 2009, the water containing capability of the ponds and lakes in HCM City decreased by 10 times.
Source: TBKTSG
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