U.S. Water News Online
SHANGHAI, China -- Shanghai says it is fighting a winning battle in trying to keep the city from sinking.
The rate of subsidence for the city of 20 million last year was 7.5 millimeters (about one-third of an inch), the slowest rate since 2000, the state-run newspaper Shanghai Daily reported, citing the Shanghai Engineering Administration.
The city reduced use of groundwater by 20 percent last year, compared with the year before, the report said without giving specific figures. Instead the city is using increasing amounts of river water and pumping water back into depleted aquifers.
Shanghai was built on marshland along the Yangtze River delta, with an elevation of only 13 feet above sea level.
In the 1960s, the city was sinking more than 4 inches a year. At that rate, parts of the city would have been flooded by 1999, it said.
Overall subsidence in 2000 was 12.3 millimeters (a half-inch), the report said. City officials hope to reduce it to 7 millimeters (just over a quarter-inch) a year by 2010, it quoted Liu Shouqi, an official with the city's land subsidence department, as saying.
It said the city was installing subsidence and leakage monitors inside the many subway tunnels now under construction to keep track of the problem.
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