Kai Tak's toxic filth must be cleaned up before a vaunted 'city within a city'

KAI Tak stands silent, but an aura of danger remains. This time it lies underground - and potentially is just as hazardous.

Imagine over many decades pouring aviation fuel, petrol, paint, sump oil, and a slew of other toxic chemicals into the ground. Fuel pipes leak, sometimes for years, under the surface. Mechanics empty unwanted anti-freeze where they stand.

Vehicles not required to meet the standards of those on public roads drip oil on to the tarmac. Commercial and military traffic comes and goes, leaving behind its cocktails of chemicals.

And then, when those decades of abuse are over, the Government earmarks that carcinogen-soaked time-bomb as land for houses, playgrounds, and schools.

In a city that has never before performed a large-scale industrial site clean-up, the problem at Kai Tak is not so much how do you do it, as how clean do you make it? With no Hong Kong laws as guidelines, are taxpayers going to be left to foot the bill? And, if trouble surfaces in 20 years, who then will be liable? The Government aims for a gleaming 'city within a city' on the site, where people will forget they are living on what once was a toxic wasteland. But government plans to treat the filth will leave the site, by its own standards, still polluted, and the danger is that the filth of decades could return to haunt residents in years to come.

Consider a place in the United States called, rather endearingly, Love Canal, after William T Love, who dug the canal in the 1880s. Sadly, the place is not endearing now. For 11 years in the 1940s and 50s, the canal was used as a chemical waste dump for an estimated 20,000 tonnes of toxic chemicals. Then it was capped with a layer of clay and sold off to the local government for US$1, on condition the seller, Hooker Chemical and Plastics Company, would not be liable for future problems. The local government built a school and houses on the land.

But as the chemicals seeped to the surface, children suffered burns when they played in backyards. Shoes dissolved. Miscarriages, birth defects, and cancer rates soared. By the 1980s, the government evacuated more than 700 families and declared Love Canal the country's first environmental disaster area.