Chiang Rai’s provincial administration is advising people to stop using water from the Sai River for consumption and eating fish caught in the river because arsenic and lead contamination levels in the water are 28 times and five times above safety limits, respectively.
The administration has also ordered all waterworks that rely on raw water from the Sai River to produce tap water to tighten their treatment processes to ensure safety before the tap water is distributed to the public.
The Sai River water has turned murky and become shallow. Villagers living along the river near the Thai-Myanmar Friendship Bridge said the shallow and murky water may intensify the contamination. Nevertheless, they said they have stopped using water from the river, except for agriculture.
They have urged the relevant authorities to check the quality of the river water regularly and identify the sources of the contamination because, in the long term, their livelihoods could be seriously affected.
Varayuth Tomboon, Mae Sai district chief, said the district’s waterworks use only a small amount of raw water from the Sai River to produce tap water. For agriculture, however, he admitted that water from the river is still necessary, but the district is trying to find alternative water sources that are not contaminated.
As an interim measure to address the contamination problem, the Water Resources Office 1 has proposed setting up three stations near the Kok, Sai and Mekong rivers to automatically check water quality around the clock. The stations would alert people in advance to changes in water quality in the three rivers. The water quality would be categorised as “green”, “yellow” or “red” to indicate the severity of the contamination.
