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RESIDENTS living near heavily-polluted Beas River in Tai Po are furious with inaction by the Environmental Protection Department to control the problem.

  The river has become a thick, black, open sewer for the pig and poultry farms in the area and smells like a toilet. Residents say it only became that way in the last couple of years.

  ''The state of the river is getting worse and worse,'' said one long-time resident, a civil servant.

  ''When you call the department, they are just sleeping. You don't know who you're dealing with.''   But Principal Environmental Protection Officer, Patrick Lei Chi-kong, said the department was not entirely to blame for the problem.

  He said the administration had agreed not to prosecute farmers after they put up stiff opposition to livestock waste controls, but this would change later this year. Also, the river was so polluted from past waste loads that it was unable to recover and just kept getting worse.

  Another resident, Ng Ngan-choi, who lives in Kam Tsin village about a kilometre away from the river, said she could smell it from her living room most days and it was particularly bad in the summer.

  ''The water has become so polluted. It's intolerable. It didn't use to be like this,'' she said.

  Ms Ng has lived in Kam Tsin village for 10 years and the civil servant has lived there all his life.

  He said he used to swim in Beas River when he was a boy, and later jogged past the river, but not any more.

  Large drains leading from the farms to the river are caked in livestock waste, and stagnant in the dry weather.

  The water quality improved briefly after the department made ex gratia payments to farmers who closed shop in 1989, but he said it had slipped markedly in the last couple of years and last summer was the worst ever.

  The situation was just as bad elsewhere in the New Territories, he added.

  ''The department has paid little concern to the remote areas. It's always telling people how much it has done in Victoria Harbour and concentrating on the city, but that's not enough,'' he said.

  ''In the New Territories region, which occupies 80 per cent of Hong Kong land, the streams are still so polluted and it's getting worse.''   Mr Lei said the administration had agreed in 1991 not to enforce livestock waste controls outside of Tolo Harbour, Mui Wo and Angler's Beach after farmers staged demonstrations, but new legislation due to be passed this year would over-ride that agreement.

  He also said the recent deterioration of Beas River probably was not because of new farms, but because the river was exhausted. Years of having livestock waste dumped into it had reduced its capacity to recover and even a relatively small amount of wastecould make it worse.

  It was not worth cleaning up the river until the sources of the pollution were controlled, he said.

    Most of the filth comes from two large farms - one with about 500 pigs and the other with several thousand chickens - but Mr Lei said 90 per cent of farmers in the area had shut down since the department made the ex gratia payments.



Polluted river raises anger