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The resurrection of Nhieu
Loc-Thi Nghe: How HCMC brought the blackwater canal back from the dead
Once a lush river, then a
stagnant ditch, the World Bank now regards the
Garbage collectors head to the bank of the Nhieu Loc -
Nguyen Van
Hoang stirs his coffee and smiles at the pigeons pecking grains of rice off
the pink tiles along the Nhieu Loc –
“I love sitting here every
afternoon, enjoying a coffee and a cool breeze,” said Hoang, a 60-year
resident of
Hoang's happy the canal is now the
kind of place you'd like to hang out.
“It used to be a dead, smelly canal
full of garbage," he said. "People clutched their noses when they
passed through this neighborhood. Now the water's turned from black to green.
The canal's like a park where people exercise, children play and birds
gather."
The Nhieu Loc –
It wasn't always so.
At one time, the Nhieu Loc was known as the river that formed the city's
northern border. The French renamed it the Arroyo De L'Avalanche after the
Gunboat Avalanche sacked the city's defenses in the late 19th century. Toward
the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the city became home to scores of
squatters. Rapid urbanization in the next two decades reduced the water body
to a polluted "black water canal" that flooded much of the city
with raw sewage in light rain. File photo
White paper river to black
water canal
What now serves as a tidy concrete
catchment was once a lustrous river.
A 19th century poem extolling the
beauty of Gia Định (
In 1859 a French general sent the
Gunboat Avalanche up the river that formed Gia Dinh's northernmost boundary
to spy on the Chi Hoa Fortress.
Historical records suggest that the
boat was likely 30 meters long and 5 meters wide.
After sacking the fort, successive
French Colonial governments referred to the body of water as Aorroyo de
l'Avalanche.
Though they built Parisian-style
opera houses, post offices and cathedrals, the French left little underground
save an unreliable combined sewage system that mingled the contents of
scattered household septic tanks with street drains during heavy rain.
The American-backed regime in
But, as late as the 1950s, many in
the city still considered the water clean enough to drink.
In the ensuing decades, as the
battle for reunification moved south,
The first arrivals settled along the
banks; those who came after built stilt homes over the water out from tin or
plastic.
Along with effluent from neighboring
factories, these houses dumped all kinds of rubbish, including human waste,
directly into the water.
In a graduate thesis submitted to the
"Whereas former literature
referred to the river as 'river', or 'creek', (Song or Rach Thi
Nghe), it is now called 'canal' (kinh or kenh),
probably due to the degradation both of its physical condition and its public
image," Tran wrote.
Flooding grew more frequent,
bringing untreated sewage onto streets and city records reflect high levels
of water-borne illness in the basin: typhoid, dysentery and serious diarrhea,
which most understand to be cholera.
By the mid-1980's, Tran was
attending elementary school along the upper reaches of the canal, which
flooded in light rain.
"Elementary school children
would walk and play in the flood water, which could reach as high as their
knees," she wrote.
A bold solution
In 1985, HCMC leaders piloted
exploratory canoes into the muck in the hopes of developing a plan to clear
it out.
“The stench was unbearable,” Nguyen
Minh Dung, a former director of the municipal housing department, told Tuoi
Tre (Youth) newspaper. “Every time we took a field trip a few of us got
sick.”
A project to clear the most congested
100-meter stretch of the canal, near Nguyen Van Troi Bridge, stopped due to
complications, he said.
A satellite
image of the canal, which stretches 8.3 kilometers back into HCMC. Each red
dot represents a point where contractors dug deep underground to construct a
3-meter wide interceptor pipe that shoots a combination of raw sewage and
rainwater out into the
In 1993, HCMC launched a US$120
million effort to relocate residents living on the slums into subsidized
apartments, dredge untold tons of sludge from the river bottom and build
concrete walls, culverts and roads along its banks.
By 1999, the Boston-based
engineering firm CDM Smith had drawn up a feasibility study on the canal's
restoration using Japanese aid funding. Subsequent studies and reports were
prepared as well as a Resettlement Action Plan.
All told, the 7,000 households were
razed.
Legal residents were offered
subsidized apartments built along the canal.
Those who received less than the
cost of a state-built apartment were given zero-interest loans and ten years
to cover the difference, according to a Swiss-led study published in a 2002
edition of Environment & Urbanization.
Those who lacked "household
books" or rented homes along the canal received no compensation. Some
relocated to precarious settlements on the edge of the city where problems
with sanitation and waterborne illness persist until today.
Many who got apartments didn't like
them or had taken on debt as they struggled to find a livelihood outside
their traditional communities.
“Barely two years after the
rehousing operation, more than a quarter of the families relocated by the
state have sold their apartments,” the Swiss study researchers wrote.
While certainly complicated, the
researchers noted that the relocation effort vastly relieved huge population
density problems (60,000 people per kilometer) and public health issues in
the city's core.
Picking a plan
HCMC leaders had committed to
creating a modern sanitation and flood control system by the early 2000s, but
questions about what the canal project would look like persisted for most of
the next decade.
The city eventually settled on a
plan that would not only cut flooding, but increase property values and draw
investment to the city's downtown.
Work on the project began in 2003,
sending green construction fences up on main roads as builders dug a 70
kilometer network of drains, culverts and sewers in a town that never stops
moving.
The project
built by CDM Smith expanded the city's existing sewers (blue lines) in the
A pumping station was built near the
Ba Son Shipyard to shoot the canal's contents into a massive underground
interceptor pipe that emptied out near the western edge of Thu Thiem in
District 2.
Trouble with unyielding clay,
crooked Chinese contractors and a few other unforeseeable circumstances
dragged construction on until August of 2012.
The cost of the first phase of the
project shot to US$248 million worth of zero-interest loans from the World
Bank and $68 million from
That total doesn't include the
roughly $120 million the city spent during the 90's on its initial dredging,
relocation and clearance plans.
Despite delays, both the bank and
city leaders have proudly touted the canal restoration as a model example of
good urban development work.
Newly planted trees, wooden benches
and fitness equipment now line the canal's attractive promenade.
In 2012, residents began holding
picnics there on evenings and weekends.
“The objectives agreed between the
Government of Vietnam and the World Bank at the beginning of the project have
been achieved,” said Victoria Kwakwa, the bank's country director in
“Flooding has been reduced by
increasing wastewater collection in the Nhieu Loc - Thi Nghe basin. The
living conditions of over 1.2 million residents in the project areas have
also been significantly improved,” Kwakwa told Thanh Nien News by
email, adding that land values in the area around the canal increased from
about $195 per square meter in 1999 to about $2,140 per square meter in 2012.
A rudimentary drawing produced by CDM Smith shows how storm
drains and septic tanks water get combined during heavy rain. Prior to the
construction of the interceptor pipe and the clearing of the canal, the
sewage often had nowhere to go but up. Now it runs through three levels of screens
before being pumped (untreated) into the
No other figures could be found for
the estimated value of land along the canal, though the downtown section is
now alive with bustling Al Fresco restaurants and drinking establishments
catering to diners late into the night.
“This project has had a
transformational impact on this area of
Dumping on the canal
The city has engaged in a
wide-ranging campaign to encourage residents to treat the nearly $500 million
canal with respect, to little avail.
A sign on the bank of the Nhieu Loc -
Longtime residents of the canal say
they're committed to doing their part, but add that others aren't holding up
their end of the bargain.
“We never throw waste into the
canal. We can still remember the days when it was seriously polluted,” said
Hoang. “Migrants who run late night eateries here and pushcart vendors [who
serve their customers] continue to dump garbage into the water.”
L. Fernando Requena, CDM Smith's
Chief Resident Engineer and, ultimately, the man who spent 14 years designing
the canal system, said there is “no chance” that any amount of litter will
return it to its former state—a specter that Vietnamese newspaper columnists
and government officials keep alive, seemingly to scare locals into behaving
better.
During a recent interview, Requena
showed how three levels of screens filter debris and ensure garbage poses no
actual threat to the canal's pumping system.
He further described the city's
trash collection system as very efficient--mostly out of necessity.
“You see those poor [men and women]
out there, every night, sweeping away with a lantern and a broom,” he said.
“It almost seems part of the culture to give them something to do.”
Truong Phi Long, deputy head of the
garbage collection team on the Nhieu Loc –
“Our team collects around 15 tons of
rubbish and water hyacinth on average a day,” Long told Thanh Nien News.
“Rubbish includes everything from plastic bags to the bodies of dogs and
cats.”
Long’s team of four supervisors and
36 workers belong to the HCMC Urban Environment Company.
They sail out at 6:30 every morning loaded
with empty garbage bins. Whenever the bins fill up, the boats return to the
banks where a truck hauls away their garbage.
Then the team goes back out to
continue collecting trash until 4 p.m.
“Rubbish also floats in from the
Gone fishing
Though the ecological recovery of
the canal has proven hard to gauge, fish have returned to its waters.
Authorities and youth volunteers
have spent the last two years releasing them, hoping to bring it back to
life.
The project has proven something of
a challenge.
During a meeting in May, Tran Dinh
Vinh, head of the HCMC Fishery Resources Protection and Quality Management
Department, said that a minimum five-year fishing ban would prove critical to
protecting stocks of released carp, tilapia, catfish, and anabas meant to
consume the organic sludge along the bottom.
On any good day, however, the new
promenades fill with amateur anglers casting rods into the canal.
A man fishes in the
There are no laws prohibiting or
restricting fishing in the city and the municipal justice department has
ruled such a ban illegal.
As such, a propaganda campaign
designed to discourage fishing through various cloth banners seems rooted in
a dual desire to nurture the canal's ecological recovery and project an image
of a civilized modern city.
But that project is running into a
hard reality of folks hoping to catch something to eat or while away days of
unemployment.
“Fish are plentiful. I usually catch
carp, catfish, and anabas,” says Thinh, who lives on
“I catch mostly for fun as I'm
currently jobless,” the young man said. “I often give what I catch to my
neighbors.”
“Many anglers, like me, fish for
fun. Others sell their catch,” he said. “Sometimes, ward police come and tell
us: ‘Stop fishing!’ But when they leave, we continue.”
Cleaning up HCMC's mess
While the city grapples with
policing the bad habits of those living and working along the canal, it's
also preparing to clean up its own act.
The project's second phase will
reroute the torrent of untreated wastewater currently flowing into the
There's even some suggestion that it
may generate clean power by “digesting” its own sludge.
City leaders have pledged to ensure
that the next phase is also cleaner in other ways.
Phan Chau Thuan, director of the
canal's project management unit, told Saigon Giai Phong (Liberated Saigon)
newspaper he'll strictly punish any contractor shenanigans, while
“simplifying administrative procedures” to make sure they don't go over time
and over budget.
That will prove critical,
considering the costs involved.
The World Bank may approve a $450
million loan for the second phase of the project this November.
Another $45 million will come from
the city and
Though the loan conditions are
certainly favorable,
Of the World Bank funds, the
International Development Association will provide a 20-year $200 million
loan at roughly two percent annual interest -- plus a five-year grace period.
The International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development is still negotiating the terms of the other
$250 million loan, which some envision as a 30-year US-dollar loan at
something close to the LIBOR rate, which banks use to provide one another
short-term loans.
Hard to judge
It's fairly difficult to find
someone who can evaluate massive infrastructure projects that isn't currently
or formerly employed by the World Bank.
Judging them, anyhow, can be a
tricky game.
“It's very hard to tell with these
sorts of projects,” said Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor and head of the
Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. “It usually takes at least 10 or 15 years until you can look back
and say: 'OK, this was done well; this wasn't.”
Those issues are already making
themselves known.
In June, during one of the first big
rains of the season, a small stretch of
No one was injured and the city has
already assembled a task force to investigate the cause of what they called a
“gas bomb.”
Requena, CDM Smith's Chief Resident
Engineer, blamed the explosion on the road contractor's failure to properly
ventilate a series of manhole shafts, causing a release of steam just below
the surface of the macadam.
Requena said the “gas bomb”
represented the kind of inevitable hiccup associated with such enormous projects
-- hiccups that pale in comparison to the benefits.
The World Bank estimates that phase
one saved residents along the canal $90 million in flood damage.
But it's unclear how long those
benefits will last.
Last year, a team of climate
scientists warned that the rapid rise of major storms could threaten those
same residents and considered, among other things, the feasibility of
relocating them.
“The soon-to-be-completed
infrastructure may reduce risk in best estimates of future conditions, but it
may not keep risk low in many other plausible futures,” they wrote of the
canal.
Robert Lempert, a RAND Corporation
scientist who led the study, noted that during the project's planning most
people around the world operated on the assumption that future climate would
be roughly the same as present climate.
“Had they not built it, risk [of
catastrophic flooding] would have gone up much higher,” he said.
Requena said the city is considering
installing a floating dam at the mouth of the canal-one that would necessitate
a complicated pump system that could remove rain pouring into the canal while
holding the river at bay.
“There was no way anyone could have
foreseen this,” he said.
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Thứ Năm, 28 tháng 8, 2014
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