The mystery of Hong Kong's lead-in-water scandal demands answers
Mike Rowse says aside from the questions about how the contamination was uncovered, the priority now is to check the entire process of water treatment and delivery for loopholes
I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around this story of lead contamination of our fresh water. The situation first came to light after a water quality check in a public housing estate commissioned by a political party.
Now think about that for a moment. There are elections for the district councils coming up in the autumn and for the Legislative Council next year, it is true, but did the Democratic Party campaign manager suddenly come up with the idea of checking water quality as a vote winner?
It doesn't seem likely. The thought was surely planted in the party's head either by a resident's complaint or a whistleblower.
If you were a whistleblower who knew that there had been some substandard work of whatever nature, or a resident who thought there was something dodgy about the water coming from your tap, surely the first place to go would be the estate management office and the housing department headquarters. So either such a report was made and brushed aside, or it was thought not worthwhile pursuing this route.
Whichever reason applies, there must be at least a suspicion that it had something to do with the identity of the parties involved. The main contractor for Kai Ching Estate in Kowloon City was the Hong Kong subsidiary of the China State Construction Company. Many prefabricated parts of the work were imported from the mainland, which, as everyone knows, is the source of most of Hong Kong's water.
Did our ministers fear that this could become another sorry chapter in the ongoing "mainland versus Hongkongers" saga? Before you could say the words "pre-emptive strike", out came statements from government officials that the likely source of the excess lead was soldering work done, conveniently, by a local plumber, whose name was promptly released.