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Intensive outdoor maintenance to prevent objects falling into water system will kick in days before Winter Games
Beijing will impose strict rules on how items can be removed from the Olympic park – similar to tight security at London’s Olympic Park – as part of its clean-up of the venue weeks before the 2020 winter games.
Special trucks will pull up at 4am to haul away 20,000 discarded items, such as personal computers, GPS devices and cameras from the Pyeongchang mountain cluster every day for eight weeks, state news agency Xinhua reported.
Organisers have called the prevention of potential leaks a “closed loop water system” that aims to prevent objects from washing into the artificial lake water or being flushed down the toilet during Games-time.
The Pyeongchang host committee, the Changwon Open Host City Delivery Development Corporation, said the authorities would not give information about the volume of items removed or their contents.
Vehicles would remove the items in batches of 3,000 a day or less, and only if staff at the site request they be lifted, organisers said.
Boats carrying the trash will fill up in eight weeks and would then be stored, they said.
The Olympic Village’s day-to-day operations are expected to be continued as normal after the Winter Games.
Of the 4.5bn cubic metres of snow and ice expected to cover the resort during the Games, 90% will fall from South Korea and 90% will be recycled, organisers said in March.
Two months after the Games opened in Seoul, Britain changed its description of the park to reflect a sophisticated security system, rather than a temporary venue.
