Research On Legal System Of Emergency Response To Sudden Water Pollution

In recent years, unexpected water pollution accidents are usually seen, which often result in threats to the physical and property safety of mass people and immeasurable losses to the social economy due to the emergency and seriousness as well as the difficulty in timely and efficient control in short time. But as a probability event, it can hardly be completely avoided fundamentally. Therefore experiences and lessons from the previous treatment of unexpected water pollution accidents should be concluded and legal system about unexpected water pollution accidents should be constantly improved,with the expectation to prevent and cope with such accidents effectively.It is deemed in this paper that the emergency operation for unexpected water pollution accidents is realized through the risk control and emergency capacity of governments at all levels prior to the accidents, emergency response during the accidents and the restoring after accidents, which are all important elements to deal with emergent environmental incidents. Firstly, through analysis on the serous unexpected water pollution accident triggered by aniline leak in Changzhi, several major problems in the emergent response to such accidents were concluded from the legal perspective,including the lagging of information disclosure, the absence of early warning and monitoring, the lack of cross-regional joint emergency response and incomplete remedy,which are against the legislative principle and idea of “protection and prevention comes first” in the New Environmental Protection Act. Secondly, problems in the current related legal system of emergency were identified as: there are no specific laws or rules that standardize the environmental monitoring and warning information collection and reporting procedure for unexpected water pollution in our; release of the information about unexpected water pollution is managed by the government; there are no organization system with unified coordination and instruction and scientific liability insurance mechanism for unexpected water pollution. These problems make it hard to deal with the accidents timely and effectively and to make up the losses and constraint the development of our legal system of emergency about unexpected water pollution accidents.At last, after combining the situation of China and referring to the experiences ofEuropean response to the Rhine pollution and the emergent response and liability insurance mechanism for unexpected water pollution in the United States, improving suggestions were proposed for China legal system in emergent unexpected water pollution: first, improve the prevention system through establishment of water environment assessment system, legal norms about unexpected water pollution monitoring and warning as well as cross-regional water pollution monitoring and warning center, in order to defend the first line for unexpected water pollution accidents;second, perfect the emergency response system, increasing the efficiency basing on the establishment of efficient information release and regional communication mechanism and regular separated cross-basin emergency guiding organizations; third, better the damage compensation system with more government support, accelerate the legal development of liability insurance mechanism for unexpected water pollution, promote policy unified insurance of the government, establish special liability insurance rate and insurance fund reserve for unexpected water pollution, develop scientific liability insurance mechanism and perfect the remedy measures. The above suggestions are expected to be a reference for the improvement of legal system of emergency about unexpected water pollution accidents in China.