[design-l.v2] The Giant Chinese Odor Dome, and Other Sad Ideas for Surviving Our Future Cities

Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-giant-chinese-odor-dome-and-other-ideas-for-surviving-our-future-cities

Chinese officials and executives, like those in every country and especially those with a feeble press, have a history of perpetrating health and environmental cover-ups—think of the SARS cover-up or dousing cities with artificial rain or literally painting a mountain green.

But not all concealment can be concealed; especially not when the concealment is the size of three football fields and sitting in the middle of downtown.

In an effort to remediate a large patch of heavily contaminated soil in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, engineers managed to unleash a smell so pungent that, last week, owners of the site took a new tactic: a giant tent to contain it all.

The toxic soil is the result of waste and pollution left behind by an insecticide factory that sat on the land for fifty years until it was closed in 2009, according to state media reports. Efforts by the investment company that now owns the land to remove the smell, such as injecting it with deodorant, have proved mostly fruitless, say neighbors. Soil samples have been sent to science institutes in Beijing and Shanghai for analysis.

And even after the dome, neighbors have complained that the "volatile pungent odor" persists. Though the 20,000-square-meter polyester tent contains an area roughly the size of three football fields and rises 36 meters near downtown, it only covers less than half of the contaminated area.


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