ENG-2018 — Page 256

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Planning, Land and Infrastructure

Drainage Services

The Drainage Services Department manages 2,750km of drains and watercourses and 27 village floodwater pumping schemes. It carries out flood prevention projects to cater for local developments and address probable effects of climate change. The planning, design and construction of flood prevention works in 2018 cost about $30 billion.

The Wong Tai Sin section of the Kai Tak River improvement works was completed in 2018. Apart from mitigating the risk of flooding in nearby areas, the department is taking the opportunity to introduce greening and ecological elements at Kai Tak River to revitalise the area and make it an urban green river corridor.

The department inspects, de-silts and repairs drainage systems regularly. In 2018, it inspected 2,300km and de-silted 780km of drains and watercourses at a cost of about $135 million.

Slope Safety

The Civil Engineering and Development Department improves slope safety by adopting better standards and technology, ensuring all new man-made slopes meet safety standards, improving the safety of existing man-made slopes, and mitigating natural terrain landslide risks. The department also issues landslip warnings and provides information, education and community advisory services on slope safety.

Under the Landslip Prevention and Mitigation Programme, the department spent $1.04 billion in 2018 to upgrade 152 substandard government man-made slopes and to mitigate the landslide risk of 33 natural hillside catchments. It also conducted safety screening studies on 100 private man-made slopes.

Drinking Water Safety

The Water Supplies Department collects water samples from the taps of randomly selected premises, as one of the key measures under the Action Plan for Enhancing Drinking Water Safety in Hong Kong, launched in 2017. Up till the end of 2018, all the water samples indicated the drinking water quality of the selected premises was in compliance with the Hong Kong Drinking Water Standards. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recognises the HKSAR Government's efforts in devising guidelines and templates for the Water Safety Plan for Buildings, which were uploaded in 2018 to a website managed jointly by the WHO and International Water Association for global reference.

Water Supplies

Water from Guangdong

Since 1965, Hong Kong has been receiving raw water from the Dongjiang, now the city's major source of raw water. The Dongjiang water supply agreement maintains flexibility in the daily supply rate, ensuring a reliable source of supply and avoiding wastage of precious water resources. In 2018, 736 million cubic metres of Dongjiang water was imported.

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