I put a little work into a post in honour of International Water Day last year.  The theme was transborder waterways – rivers and the like; pollution, taking water for irrigation and the use of dams.  I wrote about rivers crossing the DMZ.

Yesterday was World Water Day 2010 and I don’t even know what the theme was.  The Joongang has an article describing Biological Oxygen Demand or BOD and dams in Korea.  From the article:

According to a Ministry of Environment report released Friday, at the Paldang Dam, which supplies water to over 20 million inhabitants in the Seoul metropolitan area, biochemical oxygen demand – or BOD – was 1.3 parts per million last year, just 0.1 ppm less than in 2000. That falls behind the BOD target of 1.0 ppm which was set by the government in 2005.

BOD is a measure of the uptake rate of dissolved oxygen by organisms and is considered an important factor in determining water pollution. A low BOD level of 1 ppm or 2 ppm means there is not much organic waste in the water supply, whereas a BOD of 6 ppm or higher means that the water supply is polluted.

For the past five years, the Paldang Dam has consistently lagged behind the government’s target BOD.

In the same period, the BOD of water at Gimje in North Jeolla and Muan in South Jeolla worsened to 7.9 ppm in 2009 from 4.8 in 2005 and to 3.5 ppm in 2009 from 2.8 ppm in 2005, respectively.