CHAPTER VII
PUBLIC ASSISTANCE AND EMERGENCY RELIEF
74. The Year of the Dragon was a year of spectacular storms. During 1964 Hong Kong was visited by no less than five major typhoons, named by the Air Weather Wing of the United States Air Force at Guam as Viola, Ida, Ruby, Sally and Dot, the last three coming in a single month's span. No sooner had the victims valiantly tackled their losses and depriva- tions, overcome them and begun to re-establish themselves than the next wicked fairy of the meteorologists' pantheon would batter their houses, their boats or their crops and reduce their efforts to nought; it was a most disheartening and thoroughly vicious circle. Many people were further afflicted as a result of closure orders which the Building Surveyors of the Public Works Department had to impose upon the owners of rickety, crumbling and otherwise dangerous old buildings, for the sake of the safety of life and limb; this necessitated the evacuation of the occupying families at very short notice, sometimes in a matter of hours. A hundred and sixty-five such orders were made during the year, involving twenty- three thousand people. The combined total of those who had to resort to the Department for assistance in disasters came to over sixty thousand; this number included those affected by landslides, floods, house collapse or shipwreck resulting from the typhoons as well as by fires; in addition the Department supplied hot meals twice a day over cumulative periods of a fortnight for distribution among nearly ten thousand people in the New Territories. All these emergency relief measures threw an extremely wearisome burden onto the Department and onto members of the Relief Section in particular. Hot meals had to be rushed out from the kitchens and temporary camping-out accommodation found for the thousands of homeless in the covered play areas of Government schools and else- where. Success in bringing prompt aid and comfort to victims was due to the combined efforts and co-operation of the New Territories Admin- istration, the Police Force, the Resettlement and Social Welfare Depart- ments and the Civil Aid Services on the official side; while the
while the co-operation and independent initiative of voluntary agencies remained invaluable as ever in all these times of emergency. The British Red Cross Society, Catholic Relief Services, Church World Service, CARE, the Kai Fong Associations, Lutheran World Service and the Salvation Army are among the most active in providing or distributing, according to their capacity, cash grants, blankets, new and used clothing, food parcels or cooking utensils. Appendix 20 gives the details of the Department's emergency relief services during last year.
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