By It appears that testing of ground water around all US bases will be done by the Korean government to allay public fears of dioxin contamination:
“People are anxious,” a Seoul official familiar with the testing said Thursday, adding that he did not expect to find chemicals in the samples but the city wanted to allay concerns about water quality. He spoke on the customary condition of anonymity. This testing is separate from ongoing testing for oil, and the soil and groundwater removal outside U.S. Army Garrison-Yongsan and Camp Kim, that have been going on for the past decade. Earlier this week, Seoul officials said that oil leakages at Yongsan and Camp Kim in 2001 and 2006 had contaminated groundwater outside the bases. The city has spent the equivalent of $3.4 million since 2001 to remove nearly 2,000 tons of groundwater near the two bases, and officials say tests continue to show oil contamination in the area.
Seoul officials collected water samples June 7-8 from 10 locations near Yongsan, the flagship U.S. base in South Korea, including the Hamilton Hotel, the Capital Hotel and the National Museum of Korea. Analysis of the samples is expected to be completed at the end of June, according to the head of the city’s drinking water team, part of the Seoul Health and Environmental Institute.
The samples will be tested for chemicals including agricultural pesticides and dioxin. The Seoul official who spoke to Stars and Stripes said chemicals have not been detected in regular tests of the city’s water supply that are conducted several times a year.
An official from the Gyeonggi province government said Thursday that the province’s Health and Environmental Institution will begin collecting samples of underground water later this month near U.S. bases in Uijeongbu, Pyeongtaek, Paju and Dongducheon. The samples will be tested for dioxin, a component of Agent Orange, and other chemicals.
Incheon collected underground water and soil samples June 3-4 from the area around Camp Market, and Chilgok County is testing soil, underground and stream water samples near Camp Carroll for contamination from defoliants, officials said. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read more at the link, but according to the article the ground water at Camp Carroll was last tested for pollutants in 2009 and nothing was found. In fact it appears as suspected that all the agent orange claims so far are much to do about nothing. What I find most interesting about this recent agent orange scare is how it is getting so much more media coverage than when a toxic chemical was dumped into the Naktong River in 2008 which effected the water supply to the city of Daegu, a city of 2.5 million people. Plus it wasn’t even the first time toxic chemicals dumped in the river had effected the city’s water supply. People in Daegu looked like refugees back in 2008 waiting in line with jugs to receive water rations.
The USFK mortician Albert McFarland who was involved in pouring 20 gallons of diluted embalming fluid down a drain at the Yongsan Garrison mortuary that was processed through two different water treatment plants before being discharged in the Han River and had no effect on the local water supply received more media coverage than the Daegu spill as well. McFarland even had a blockbuster monster movie made due to his unfortunate incident. Does anyone think that a movie sequel about a monster in the Naktong River will be made anytime soon? I think we are more likely to see an Agent Orange movie monster before anything coming from the Naktong River.
4:33 pm on June 14th, 2011 1
Anyone with Korean language skills want to watch the Korean news to see how much play it is getting there?
I guess I’ll have to start reading the Korean English-language dailies again. Before when I’ve checked, I found that stories in the English press were translations of ones running in the Korean-language papers. The English ones did little original reporting. When I was teaching adults, whenever class after class came in wanting to talk about the same thing, which happened frequently, you could tell what they had read or heard that day on the news, and usually it was echoed in the English press.
4:47 pm on June 14th, 2011 2
Oh, I have some work tommorow but when I get home I can go watch ytn and give you back some info
5:05 pm on June 14th, 2011 3
#1 – last week this story was leading off (at YTN at least), for a dew days. This morning I didn’t see one mention of it or any other possible anti-US thing on YTN throughout their usual morning 30-minute blast. My conclusion: the testing found nothing, will continue to find nothing, and none of this will be reported in the Korean media…
5:11 pm on June 14th, 2011 4
Those people aren’t waiting for water rations, they are getting water at a “spring”, ironically many of which are located close to gas stations.
6:00 pm on June 14th, 2011 5
Arwork is correct. Look at the picture carefully. Koreans never drank from the tap. You can see the people in the front row, filling their bottles from the spring – a sight that was repeated thousands times over, everywhere in Korea, especially every morning.
GI Korea has taken this innocent picture and turned it into a propaganda of his own – to give his readership an impression that people were so panicked that they lined up for water rations.
7:01 pm on June 14th, 2011 6
Actually, you are all wrong. This is a picture near the front gate of a makalli factory during a half-off sale.
7:07 pm on June 14th, 2011 7
Humphreys used to have a tap near the drive thru gate. Locals would go there to fill containers.
8:34 pm on June 14th, 2011 8
No one I know drinks tap water in Korea. When I asked, they just say it’s not safe…
Is that true? What’s the issue? Bacteria? Chemicals? Lead?
8:56 pm on June 14th, 2011 9
Yes, McFarland got shafted.. anywhere in the land of the big PX what he did is done daily some where an is not een considered a wrong. If fact it is the perfeered method of disposal.
9:13 pm on June 14th, 2011 10
@8,
Korean tap water is “Safe” for general use like washing stuff. Its been treated at a plant. The difference is that it hasn’t been treated to be safe for drinking, there was no chlorination on the water. Instead your expected to have your own filter at your home or buy the big jugs of bottled water. Small sink level filter’s aren’t expensive but you’ll be changing the filter out every few months. Larger ones are a bit pricey but they tend to go longer without needing to be changed. In my apartment building there is a built in filter that makes the water safe to drink, but its only connected to the kitchen sink. The filter is for the building and there is a maintenance fee associated with its upkeep and changing. If things are really bad and your hurting on money you can drink tap water, but you’ll probably get diarrhea as there are bacteria present in the water.
10:52 pm on June 14th, 2011 11
Koreans don’t drink tap water. I was told numerous times not even to wash fruits and vegetables in tap water unless I boiled it first.
2:39 am on June 15th, 2011 12
#10,
Dude, what are you talking about? It’s definitely chlorinated.
#11,
They most certainly do, and you do every time you drink water at a local restaurant. Water filters are very popular here, even amongst those who are hooked up to the municipal water supply.
2:59 am on June 15th, 2011 13
#10, is a bunch of nonsense. It tells you how much he knows but pretends to know.
Korean water is safely treated and is safe to drink. Korean water treatment was found to satisfy all 145 requirements by World Health Organization’s safety inspection standards, and contains zero bacteria. In 2009, the UN awarded Seoul for its 24 hour real time monitoring system with a public service awards. The tests done in Korea is much more stringent than tests done in the US and Japan. Korea has been tireless trying over the last decades to improve the water treatment by putting in new treatment facilities. New facilities and new infrastructures with brand new technologies – which all combine to state of the art water treatment facilities that puts third world US to shame.
So give me a break that Korean water contains germs and you’ll get sick.
So why don’t Korean people drink out of the tap water? Simple. Out of old habit of fear from the old days when Korean water treatment level wasn’t up to snuff. But it also doesn’t mean their fears are not warranted. Old buildings may have corrosive pipes and polluted tanks. There have been big media stories on the news about these in the past, which makes people jittery, and Korean people don’t trust the government when they’re on a campaign to make people drink out of tap waters. The more the government tries hard, the more suspicious Korean people get, that there’s some ulterior motive behind it. It doesn’t mean the water is not safe to drink. It won’t kill you on the spot, but why take a chance? But much of those bottled water you love to drink, they’re mostly tap water – they won’t tell you that because they’re ripping you off.
3:18 am on June 15th, 2011 14
12 OK. Koreans will drink “tap water” if they have it filtered out of saftey concerns…
6:25 am on June 15th, 2011 15
@4 & 5 – If you bothered to click the link I provided you would have read the image caption from Yonhap:
So who is spreading propaganda now? The bottom line is that USFK has never had any pollution issue that forced people to wait in line for emergency drinking water.
7:10 am on June 15th, 2011 16
It’s time for the flocculator
8:00 am on June 15th, 2011 17
Sorry, Kangaji…
The Flocculator won’t work.
It only makes colloids come out of suspension.
Since 1,4 dioxane is highly soluble in water, it makes a solution…
…ergo, at first glance, one might think it’s time for the Precipitator…
…but as it is a liquid above 12*C, the Distiller might also work.
But it is defiantly not a job for the Flocculator.
8:43 am on June 15th, 2011 18
B ut alas it does not rhyme with perculator
3:09 pm on June 15th, 2011 19
That is true.
Rhyme is important in good chemistry.
5:49 pm on June 15th, 2011 20
Is there a place in modern society for Gangsta Chemistry?
Yo, I’m a gangsta and a thug
I’m a stone-cold killer
gettin’ crunk with my homies
on a reflux distiller.
I gots a colloidal suspension
so my flocculator rocks
when it separates fly hoes
from the biitches with the Glocks.
etc.
9:57 pm on June 15th, 2011 21
I was talking to a retired ROK Army colonel here in the Seattle area today and he had the following to say about agent orange at Camp Carroll. First the ROK Army buried stuff all the time up though the 1980′s just like the US,it was the easy way.
Second.. the Camp Carroll issue is what Koreans call a shallow pot of boiling water. The left makes a big deal about it andthere is big interest for a coupleof weeks and then it goes away, just like the steam goes away when the pot boils dry.
10:04 pm on June 15th, 2011 22
As I have posted here before. HOUSE needs this story to make his VA case…. He has medical issues that may or may not be servoce connected, however, if he can make a case that there might hav3e been agent orange there and he has 2 “witneses” that say they buried Agetn Organge then he migth get VA to give him disability I hope he really believed that he did waht he thinks he did and was nto scamming the VA.. because of the harm to ROK/US relations.. I just know that there was not Agent Orange there in 1979.
10:19 pm on June 15th, 2011 23
#21 Fair analogy but the problem is the water never really boils all away. I’ve used a similar, basically the same, analogy of boiling water to describe how this works with the media and the society at large. I have every confidence it fit Korean society from the 1990s to about 2005, but I haven’t been so sure since about 2008.
It goes like this:
Korean society likes to keep an acceptable amount of heat on USFK – Never too hot – but never too cold. They do not want to make things boil so hot that they do lasting damage to the alliance and produce a major drawdown in the number of US troops in Korea. They also don’t want the protesting fun to leak to the world press and give SK a bad global image.
But, from time to time, they like to turn the heat up and get the water to boiling.
Protesting has a very, very, very, centuries-old history in Korean society. Koreans are also highly nationalistic. Periodic spikes in anti-US sentiment were the norm in the 1990s until about 2004.
The press was one of the requent leaders or bandwagon jumpers of those spikes.
My contention is — a barrage of press coverage like this, even if it does not come with large street demonstrations, is necessary to keep the water lukewarm at least, in order to prepare the society for the next session of venting whenever they feel like it.
It seems to have changed when Roh got the Blue House. There were a number of issues that could have sparked significant negative press coverage and/or sizable protests, but they didn’t happen.
Cows Gone Crazy! happening as soon as a conservative was back in the Blue House seemed to signal things were back to normal, but then we haven’t really seen anything — until now…
10:25 pm on June 15th, 2011 24
I know that US drinking water quality monitoring is subject to more than 210 chemicals and additional bio-assessment test for not-regulated compounds. So, US has more stringent policy than Korea. And it is a good news, hearing that AO was not detected. But I will believe it if I see the report showing the sampling protocols and analytical results for 2,4-D and TCDD. Any one knows Method Detection Limit used for the AO test? USFK’s lab. capability in Korea?
10:47 pm on June 16th, 2011 25
I had one Korean guy tell me in 2005 that he could still smell something at the Itaewon and/or Noksapyeong subway stations caused by those “20 gallons.”
11:17 pm on June 16th, 2011 26
That’s right. Korean gov’s data has 20% +/- error. And USFK does not talk about. it. So, GIs are in doom
11:22 pm on June 16th, 2011 27
Is it joking? I know the fact. And why smoking at Hamilton hotel? I do not think it helps US, but USFK and some Korean Gov.?