of the lack of specific data on this point. Caritas also operates a school meals programme for about two thousand children in the Aberdeen area, and Lutheran World Service, Church World Service and CARE between them maintain a total of twelve milk distribution centres and four mobile canteens. This welcome emphasis on improving the diet of school chil- dren should help them to obtain fuller benefit from their expensive education.
75. While the scale of public assistance contracted under the tauter administration described above, demands for emergency relief could not of course be controlled or even forecast. Fortunately Hong Kong suffered no large natural disaster during this year, no typhoons and few house collapses. However the emergency relief teams of the Relief Sec- tion were regularly called out to help families and individuals turned into the streets as the result of closure orders imposed on the owners of dangerous buildings. Provision of food and temporary shelter can minimize the temporary misery and hopelessness that such incidents bring. This kind of relief was given in circumstances caused by forty-eight separate closure orders, involving the evacuation of over seven thousand people. Only two conflagrations merit mention here-one in Tung Tau Village in April, which destroyed the homes of seventeen hundred, and another in Chuk Yuen in February, with a thousand victims. The other severe disaster of the year was an explosion of a consignment of toy pistol caps in Kennedy Town, when six people died; the injured and relatives of the victims received emergency help. Appendix 21 gives details of emergency relief.
76. The Community Relief Trust Fund continued to give longer term aid to victims of natural disasters; cash grants are made, according to a scale approved by the Fund's Committee, to help needy families who suffer death or injury or lose their accommodation or means of livelihood. The annual report of the Trustee of this Fund appears separately. It should also be mentioned here that the Relief Section has now taken over the periodical review of all beneficiaries from the War Memorial Fund.
77. The co-operation of voluntary agencies remains invaluable in times of emergency. The British Red Cross Society, Catholic Relief Serv- ices, CARE, Church World Service, the Kaifong Associations, Lutheran
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