PUBLIC WORKS AND UTILITIES
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To encourage economy, almost all fresh water supplies are metered, and the consumer is charged $1.00 per thousand gallons. Continuous overhaul and maintenance of the 85,000 meters in service forms a large proportion of the work of the Waterworks workshops. In addition, all castings made by local firms for the Waterworks are tested and machined by the workshops staff.
Most properties in Hong Kong have to rely on well or stream course sources for flushing supplies. For crowded areas such as large resettlement blocks, with a population density of 2,500 persons to the acre, any well is inadequate and increasing use is being made of sea water for flushing. At a rate of 10 gallons per day per person (with a total population of over 3,000,000) this has effected a real saving of treated water. Sea water is pumped to service reservoirs such as those at North Point, Chai Wan, Piper's Hill and Kowloon Tsai for this type of distribution. During the year further flushing reservoirs were added to the system at Tai Wo Ping, Wong Tai Sin, Ma Lau Tong and Jordan Valley.
The Water Authority also works to improve and extend the traditional irrigation systems on which the New Territories farmers depend for their water and, thus, their livelihood. Since the war, Government has given extensive help to farmers by building water- tight diversion dams and by lining earth irrigation channels, to ensure that the best possible use is made of the water in stream courses for flooding paddy fields and for watering the steadily increasing acreage of vegetable cultivation. Further assistance has been given by the construction of storage reservoirs which can be filled during the rainy season. These not only serve as an insurance against delay in spring planting, if the rains are late, but also may be used by the farmers during the dry weather to irrigate an additional crop of vegetables in fields which would otherwise have to be left hard and fallow. During 1961 in the Pat Heung area the irrigation reservoir at Ho Pui, with a storage capacity of 110 million gallons was completed. So were two dams at Tsing Tam behind which 32 million gallons of irrigation water can be stored. The Water Authority also constructed two dams at Wong Nai Tun and Kwu Tung, together with 48,000 feet of irrigation channels and 56 diversion dams.
The official hours of water supply throughout the year averaged 11.8 hours per day and varied generally for the Colony as a whole