caution:seawater in hong kong

Posted by Yuka as Hot Cities

If you want to know the real Hong Kong you need to take to the water, for Hong Kong is not simply a city—it is an archipelago of 260 islands. And only by being in the middle of them can you see the salty, sultry Hong Kong of rugged coastlines and deserted bays the way the early fishermen and pirates used to see it.

This explains why the weekend junk trip has been, for decades, a cherished local institution (a junk is a traditional Chinese sailing vessel, but these days the word mostly refers to motorized pleasure craft). Groups of friends will charter a junk, pack a picnic, fill a cool box with wine and beer, and head out to a remote cove, where the junk will drop anchor and everyone dives in the water. We have three junk trips lined up in as many weekends.

But here’s the thing. I read recently that only 18% of Hong Kong’s sewage gets secondary or tertiary treatment before being pumped into the sea. The rest simply gets primary treatment (all that means is that solids like condoms and tampons are removed) or chemically enhanced primary treatment (a process by which added chemicals cause sewage particulates to coagulate so that more solid matter can be captured). Less than 0.01% of our sewage makes it to the tertiary stage, which is the stage that actually disinfects.

I suppose this was OK back in the golden age of the junk trip, when we were a colonial garden city of a few hundred thousand souls. But today we number 7 million, and a population like that represents a frightening amount of sewage for these waters. We were on a boat a couple of weeks ago and as we pulled into a far-flung and theoretically idyllic bay, we could actually smell sewage in air. I vowed to avoid swimming in Hong Kong seawater for the foreseeable future.

Incidentally, last Sunday a newspaper article reported that marine police were unable to cope with recreational boaters who have heart attacks at sea because defibrillators were not carried aboard police launches. But it’s not defibrillators that boaters need. It’s biohazard suits.