Taiwan prioritizes improving performance of reservoirs

2021/02/05

Enhancing the performance of Taiwan’s 95 water storage facilities is one of the government’s top priorities under its farsighted aquatic resources management program aimed at delivering clean and stable supplies throughout the 21st century and beyond.
 
 Chien Chao-chun, chief of the Water Resources Agency’s Conservation Division under the Ministry of Economic Affairs, said it is quite difficult to build new reservoirs in Taiwan these days. The focus is on ensuring the longevity of existing ones, he added.
 
 According to the WRA, maintaining the health of reservoirs is challenging as Taiwan is prone to natural disasters like typhoons. In 2009, Typhoon Morakot dumped 91 million cubic meters of sediment into Zengwen Reservoir in Chiayi County, southern Taiwan. This prompted the agency to construct a desilting tunnel at the country’s largest water storage facility.

One the central planks in the WRA’s approach to remedying the situation is removing sediment and other materials from reservoirs. An average 2.43 million cubic meters of the former was pulled out of Zengwen annually from 2017 to 2019, up from 1.39 million cubic meters during the 2009 to 2016.
 
 The Council of Agriculture is playing a supporting role with measures designed to conserve reservoir watershed areas by replanting wattles and stringing nets. In 2019, the COA started experimenting with unmanned aerial vehicles distributing seeds over collapsed spots in inaccessible locales.
 
 Special attention is being paid to 22 reservoirs mainly providing drinking water to households. Since 2017, water quality is tested at these facilities monthly, as compared with the previous standard of quarterly.

Other government agencies are contributing to the cause. WRA’s Taipei Water Management Office is taking the lead in managing the watershed of northern Taiwan’s Feitsui Reservoir.
 
 TWMO is building pipelines carrying domestic sewage to plants for treatment, as well as equipping households in remote regions with the capacity for self-treatment of waste water.
 
 Reducing agricultural pollution is also high on the agenda. TWMO promotes and supports the installation of systems using vegetation and pebbles to filter runoff containing fertilizer and pesticide residue seeping from farmland during heavy rainfall.
 
 Lin Jen-yang, director of the Water Environment Research Center at National Taipei University of Technology, believes Taiwan is moving in the right direction regarding sustainable aquatic resources management. It is positive to take action after something happens, but it is truly wise to take preventive measures, he said.

Source: Taiwan Today (https://taiwantoday.tw/index.php)