ENG-2008 — Page 343

The Environment | 275

Intruder Alarm and Neighbourhood Noise

The Police handles complaints about intruder alarms and neighbourhood noise from domestic premises and public places.

Water Quality and Sewerage

Water pollution has increased with urban development and population growth. The lack of proper treatment for most of the sewage from older urban areas around Victoria Harbour resulted in poor water quality there but since the Harbour Area Treatment Scheme (HATS) Stage 1 went into operation at the end of 2001, there has been a marked improvement. The Government is taking steps to implement the second stage of the scheme soon, to ensure that the improvement is sustained.

In addition, pollution control at source has yielded positive results, and river quality has also improved. The percentage of rivers in the 'good' and 'excellent' categories increased from 34 per cent in 1986 to 82 per cent in 2008, and the percentage in the 'bad' and 'very bad' categories fell from 45 per cent in 1986 to 6.4 per cent in 2008.

Sewage Treatment and Disposal

At present, the public sewerage system serves 93 per cent of the population and collects about 2.7 million cubic metres of waste water every day. About 70 per cent of the collected sewage receives chemical or higher levels of treatment before being discharged.

HATS Stage 1 collects sewage from the urban areas of Kowloon, Tsuen Wan, Kwai Tsing, Tseung Kwan O and the northeastern part of Hong Kong Island and transports it through a network of deep tunnels to Stonecutters Island for treatment.

The Government is implementing the second stage in two phases, HATS Stages 2A and 2B. HATS Stage 2A involves extending the deep tunnel system to take the untreated sewage from the remaining parts of Hong Kong Island to the Stonecutters Island Sewage Treatment Works. The treatment plant will be expanded to provide centralised chemical treatment to sewage from the entire HATS catchment with fast- track provision of part of the disinfection facilities in 2009. Design of HATS Stage 2A is now well under way with target for commmissioning of the works in 2014. Under the second phase (HATS Stage 2B), biological treatment facilities will be provided on an adjacent site, the implementation programme being based on the results of a review in 2010-11 of water quality trends and population and sewage flow build-up.

Details of HATS are available on the 'A Clean Harbour for Hong Kong' website, www.cleanharbour.gov.hk.

Apart from HATS, the Government has spent a further $16 billion on other sewerage schemes since 1991 and will spend another $12.8 billion on schemes over the next five years. These include sewerage for rural villages. Under the Water Pollution Control (Sewerage) Regulation, the EPD is empowered to direct house owners to connect their waste water pipes to new public sewers. Since the