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REVIEW
Harbour to Plover Cove, it could be led westwards past Sha Tin to the site of the main filters. The Integrated Scheme requires an ancillary balancing reservoir in the Shing Mun valley below the Jubilee reservoir, and others at Sha Tin Wai and Three Fathoms Cove on the eastern shore of Tide Cove. Many of the pipelines and tunnels for this integrated scheme would be designed to take water flowing in either direction so that the utmost use could be made of storage capacity, and savings could be made by allowing as much water as possible to flow by gravity rather than by pump. The Scheme also includes the novel concept of indirect catchments tapped in part by tunnels leading inwards to a larger tunnel run- ning through the heart of a mountain. The Consultants proposed and Government agreed that work should start immediately on the section of the scheme between Tai Po and Sha Tin, together with the delivery pipes and tunnel through Beacon Hill and a large service reservoir in Kowloon (estimated to cost in all about $100 million). By this means additional winter supplies of about 20 million gallons a day might become available in 1964, well before the completion of either Plover Cove or Hebe Haven reservoir. Immediate execution of this section of the Integrated Scheme will have further advantages. By this time it seemed probable that water would be flowing from Sham Chun early in 1961. The first plan was to bring it to the Tai Lam catchwaters above Sek Kong in pipes and so to Tai Lam reservoir from where it would reach the urban distribution plant at Tsuen Wan. But the capacity of the Tsuen Wan filters limited the quantity that could be handled in this way to about 15 to 20 million gallons a day. If the Sham Chun waterworks were able to provide more water at a later date, there would have to be some other way of bringing it into town. The proposal was, therefore, to divide the pipeline coming in from the border near Fanling and lead part of the supply round through Tai Po and integrate it into the Plover Cove system. It would not be necessary to wait for the Plover Cove reservoir to be ready since the tunnel system from Tai Po to the new reservoir in the Shing Mun valley would be able to deliver this water also to the new filters at Sha Tin. The Consultants thought that the whole cost of the integrated scheme might be of the order of $641 million, compared with about $541 million for the