Ensuring a healthy, pollution-free environment
Print Edition
Jiang Xiaohong proudly says she and her team walked every meter of the 3.9-square-kilometer Shanghai Disney Resort site in the town of Chuansha. It took seven months.
Jiang, 34, is a senior engineer at the Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences. She and her team were asked to conduct environmental assessment surveys on the Disney site long before negotiations on the site were concluded or construction even began.
“We started working in 2009,” Jiang said. “Simply speaking, the Disney people wanted to know if the land was polluted and if it was, what measures needed to be taken to restore it.”
A tough assignment, considering that China at the time had no operative standard for such a demanding environmental assessment.
Jiang said she felt it was necessary for her team to cover every centimeter of the site to gain first-hand knowledge of its environment.
The team was divided into four groups of five people each. Most of the survey work fell during hot summer months. To beat the scorching sun, team members began work at five in the morning, knocked off at 10am and then resumed work at two in the afternoon.
Jiang hails from the city of Wenling in neighboring Zhejiang Province. She graduated with a master’s degree from Tongji University’s Environmental Engineering College in 2004 and started working as a researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Environmental Sciences. Her first big project was work on the site for the World Expo Shanghai 2010.
Jiang visited the site of Hong Kong Disneyland before construction there was finished. She said it was hard to envision how all the mounds of dirt would be transformed into a theme park. In 2010, she took her son, then three years old, to Hong Kong Disneyland and was astonished to see the final result.
Environmental evaluation depends on fieldwork. The first step is to identify polluted spots and categorize what are known as “recognized environmental conditions.” That work began even before demolition at the Shanghai Disney site.
Jiang and her team visited a chemical plant, printing house, textile factory, residential neighborhoods, landfills, rice paddies and pig farms in the area to monitor possible pollutants.
They talked with staff workers and local villagers to piece together the history of the area.
“If the land is filled now, we needed have to know what the place was used for before,” she said.
Each “recognized environmental condition” was logged and labeled before any buildings at the site were demolished. Within three months, Jiang and her team has recorded more than 250 “conditions,” represented by what they called “dots” on a map.
The second phase was sampling.
“At this stage, we were required to precisely locate the dots with professional machines to get the underground water and soil for sample tests,” Jiang said.
Large rigs drilled down about six meters, and extracted samples were taken back to the lab to test for metal contamination, pesticides and volatile organic compounds.
Risk evaluation reports were then compiled for restoration projects.
“The first and second phases were extremely tough,” Jiang said. “It was a challenge, but I welcomed the challenge because I am not a person who likes to sit idle.”
Her son, now six, is proud of his mother.
“He introduces me to his friends as the mother who helped build Disneyland,” she said. “Of course, I will take him to the resort when it is finished.”
What’s the biggest thing you learned while working on the Disney project?
A: The Americans’ meticulous work attitude impressed me a lot. I also learnt how to cooperate with people with different work systems and styles.
How do you expect Shanghai Disneyland to be different from other theme parks?
A: It will be more fun. Hong Kong Disneyland is a lot of fun and makes everyone feel involved. I hope Shanghai Disneyland can do even better.
What has the Shanghai Disney project meant to your industry? Can you give some examples?
A: The project has helped advance the industry and become a standard going forward. As a matter of fact, China has few standards for soil assessment and none for the underground water currently. With this project, we have pinned down a draft system based on Chinese standards and borrowed expertise from countries such as Holland and the US.
At the same time, the academy is working on a new project to set up a China environmental evaluation system with full standards and with norms on building demolition to minimize risks to the environment.
What are the top three theme parks in Shanghai or in the Yangtze River Delta in your mind?
A: I’ve been to the Dinosaurs Park in Changzhou and the Spring and Autumn Park in Wuxi, both in Jiangsu Province, but I don’t find them very interesting. I’m counting on the Shanghai Disney Resort now.
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