Environmental officials in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province have been detained for covering the equipment used for monitoring air quality in order to falsify the monitoring results, local media reported.
Police in Xi'an detained He Limin, chief of the Environmental Protection Bureau in the Chang'an district of Xi'an, and Li Sen, the head of the monitoring station, on charges of secretly entering an air monitoring station and covering the equipment with cotton in order to be able to manipulate the monitoring statistics, the China Business View reported.
Li also deleted the surveillance video footage in the station when the National Environmental Monitoring Center received an alert prompted by data exception at the station and dispatches inspectors to Chang'an district, according to the report.
The monitoring station, which is under the direct administration of the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP), is used for monitoring pollutants in the air and sending real-time statistics to the MEP as an important reference for environmental policymaking.
A source told the China Business View that Li and other environmental officials did this to make air monitoring statistics look better and avoid punishment.
Covering the equipment with cotton is like putting a mask on it, which will affect the monitoring of air quality, Wang Gengchen, a research fellow from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
The suspects' behavior, which would severely influence the sampling system and cause data exceptions, would also disturb the national air quality monitoring system, said Wang.
In the light of fake data provided by some local government officials, the National Environmental Monitoring Center now adopts a real-time data monitoring system to collect air quality statistics from stations across China, according to the China Business View report.
