Inspectors go with the flow in river monitoring campaign

Teams have been assessing water quality in 70 cities nationwide. Hou Liqiang reports from Yulin, Shaanxi.

The sun was strong. The wind was soft. The air was clean. The sky was blue and cloudless. The weather forecast said we could expect a maximum temperature of about 30 C, but if we stood in the sun it felt like it was raining fire.

Welcome to summer in Yulin, Shaanxi province, on the border of the Loess Plateau and the Ordos Desert, also known as the Mu Us Desert, in North China.

The only people visible were a team of environmental inspectors who braved the extreme heat as they patrolled riverbanks looking for signs of contaminated water, such as discoloration or a strong, unpleasant smell.

Soon after inspector Sun Yunhai started patrolling the Shahe River his shirt was soaked with sweat.

The river is only 3.5 kilometers long, but it took the 32-year-old almost three hours to complete a patrol to confirm or disprove the local government's claim that it had cleaned up the waterway, eradicating household and industrial waste and a foul odor.

In addition to noting inlets that discharged wastewater, Sun occasionally climbed up the steep bank to examine overhanging pipes and check if the pumping stations were working normally.

"It's one of the easiest tasks we undertake. It's much better than working in Xi'an, Shaanxi's capital, where the rivers are much longer and the temperature is even higher," he said, his forehead beaded with sweat.

National campaign

Zhang Bo, director-general of water quality management at the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, said it is not unusual for environmental inspectors to walk more than 20 km a day.

From May to July, Zhang oversaw the activities of 30 teams that carried out inspections in 70 cities across 30 provinces and regions as part of a national campaign undertaken by his ministry and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

According to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, 1,127 waterways - mainly rivers - in the cities had been reported for containing discolored, foul-smelling water. The campaign targeted 993 waterways that local governments claimed to have treated and cleaned up. However, 74 of them failed to pass the inspectors' assessments.