Massive earthmovers and trucks roar as they dump rocks the size of cars into the sea off South Korea's west coast in a map-altering reclamation project at the center of a bitter environmental dispute.
PUAN, South Korea — Massive earthmovers and trucks roar as they dump rocks the size of cars into the sea off South Korea's west coast in a map-altering reclamation project at the center of a bitter environmental dispute.
The project calls for one of the biggest landfills in history covering about 155 square miles -- two-thirds the area of Singapore and more than six times the size of Manhattan.
The South Korean government and the province of North Cholla where the project is located say it is desperately needed to breathe life into the declining region of Saemangeum.
The project is aimed at increasing farm land and also parks that could help spur development in an area with no significant industry and which is losing people to more advanced parts of the country.
Conservationists and some residents say the reclamation project will be a massive environmental disaster that will destroy fishing assets, kill rare migratory birds and worsen the water quality of the rivers that feed into the tidal flat.
They say the project was conceived when the South was having trouble feeding its people after the 1950-53 Korean War and wanted to increase agricultural production. It has stayed alive for decades because of sheer bureaucratic inertia and serves no practical purpose for the country, they say.
But time is running out for them because the government is closer to shutting the last remaining gaps of a 22-mile sea wall and creating 108 square miles of farm land and fresh-water lakes covering another 46 square miles.
The wall is scheduled to shut on April 23.
"There is nobody here. Who's going to farm all that land?" said Ahn Bae-ok, 66, leaning against the stucco wall of a cowshed on the edge of a field of mud.
She says her family used to work the tidal flat every day, digging for shellfish, and farmed fish and seaweed further out in the water. Life was hard but peaceful and there was enough money to put her children through school.
"There are no shellfish now," she said, pointing to the tidal flat and then to a hill that has been torn apart by explosives to create boulders that are being dumped into the sea.
BATTLE AGAINST THE SEA
Hills and mountains in the region are being flattened to provide material for the land reclamation.
"We call this a battle against the sea," said Lee Sang-woon, one of the hundreds of construction workers at the site.
Lee says the sense of mission is heightened by the sheer enormity of the project and the possibility that the wall will not stand up to the strong currents.
Two gates consisting of 18 pairs of massive steel slabs will be used to help drain out the sea water after the project is finished and regulate the water flowing downstream from the Mangyong and Dongjin Rivers that converge into Saemangeum Bay.
But the engineering feat makes for an ecological disaster, said U.K.-born conservationist Nial Moores, who is based in the southern Korean port city of Pusan.
Several hundred thousand migratory birds, including the Spoon-billed Sandpiper, Nordmann's Greenshank and the Great Knot, stop and feed in Saemangeum, in many cases the single stop in their long flight from Australia to breeding grounds in Siberia.
"For those particular species, the Saemangeum area has been identified as the single most important site in the Yellow Sea, and, by extension, all of Asia," Moores said.
By choking the tidal flats and killing the shellfish and young fish that the shore birds feed upon, the project will probably lead to the extinction of some bird species, he said.
"We already know what the impact will be. We are under no illusion," he said.
DISREGARD FOR SCIENCE
Young people have been leaving the area and there are fewer people left to farm the land, critics said.
They said much of the land was likely to be useless for farming, remaining saturated with salt from sea water.
The government says the area's ecology is changing and the reclamation project is essential.
Pollution from the rivers flowing into the bay and periodic flooding in the storm season meant the region was slowly dying already, said officials at the Korea Rural Community and Agriculture Corporation that manages the project.
What was being created with the sea wall was a controlled environment backed by ecological science and land that would allow high-productivity farming.
"We often talk about the dream of exporting environmental technology one day, after the work here is done," said Kim Wan-joong, a deputy director of environmental affairs at the state-run development corporation.
She rejected Moores' argument that the landfill would mean the extinction of some migratory birds.
"As big as Saemangeum is, there are wetlands all up and down the coast and surrounding the Yellow Sea," Kim said on the edge of the sea wall, her Hyundai covered in dust and parked by a mountain of boulders.
"I look at it like, if you miss a rest area on the highway, it's not the end of the world. There'll be another one."
Moores said that was the kind of unscientific thinking that disregarded the important environmental role of wetlands for animals, and as a buffer zone between land and sea.
He also rejected the government's argument that tidal flats would re-form outside the sea wall. "Absolute nonsense," he said.
"These birds are extraordinarily fine-tuned biological machines," he said. "They get here, and all they find is dry mud and rocks and concrete. They are going to die."
Source: Reuters
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