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minds of Fire Officers and consideration of their merits or demerits is a highly technical question. We therefore make no comments on this aspect of fire prevention.
Fire Precautions in the Construction of Godowns:
87. There is however one important point and a peculiarly difficult one on which we must comment. Undoubtedly a contributory factor, if not the main factor, which made for the complete destruction of the Wing On Godown No. 2, was that it was an unpartitioned building of some 750,000 cubic feet capacity. Mr. Brand described the building in his evidence as an "uncontrollable fire risk", a term which has only come into use since the war. If the godown had been partitioned either vertically or hori- zontically into completely separate compartments, the Fire Brigade would have had a much better chance of saving at least part of the building and its contents. The plans of all structures which are in any way out of the ordinary are checked for fire preven- tion and extinction purposes by the Chief Officer of the Fire Brigade or his Deputy before being passed by the Building Authority. After the passage of the Building Ordinance, 1935, we have no doubt that the plans for a building such as the Wing On Godown No. 2, in view of the purposes to which it was to be put, would not have been passed unless it had been divided into sealed-off units of a limited cubic capacity. The Buildings Ordinance confers no powers on the Fire Brigade or the Building Authority to require structures erected before the passage of the Ordinance to be adapted to conform with the Ordinance, so that the Fire Brigade was not in a position to demand the sub-division of the godown. If a licence had been sought to store dan- gerous goods in this godown, it would have been another matter, as the Chief Officer has power under the Dangerous Goods Ordinance to make the grant of a licence condi- tional on structural alterations. We considered whether these powers should be extended to all godowns if our recommendations for registration are accepted, but in view of the heavy expenditure that might be entailed and the technical considerations involved, we were unable to reach a conclusion on this point. We regard this matter as of importance and recommend that a Committee of qualified persons be appointed to consider it.
Publicity for Storage Regulations:
88. It was brought out very clearly during the inquiry that there is a very great ignorance of the dangerous goods regulations, not so much among the more important godown companies or older established houses, but among lesser godown owners and importers and exporters. Elsewhere we have suggested possible reasons for this. We consider that part of the blame for this lack of knowledge must be laid at the door of the Fire Brigade, who do not seem to have made any efforts to make the regula- tions more widely known. It is unimaginative to approach the matter with the view that the regulations exist, it is for the public to find out about them and conform. We can think of many ways in which the regulations could be brought to the notice of the public, i.e. by the use of handbills, printed extracts on the backs of licence forms, Chinese translations and explanations of the various categories, in short active assistance to the public in the methods of storage, as opposed to the negative method of reproof for neglect of these methods. We feel that the Chambers of Commerce and the Fire Insurance Association might reasonably be invited to co-operate in the preparation of such publicity material.
Rearrangement of Ordinances and Regulations:
89. The regulations we have said are basically simple and in our opinion sound, but instructions for the storage of certain specified substances, particularly petroleum products, are very complicated. The method of landing and storage of these products is highly technical and the ordinary importer or exporter or godown-keeper may never deal with them. The long series of special regulations connected with their handling and storage might usefully be segregated from the main body of the regulations, reducing the remainder to more manageable proportions. There might also be ad- vantage in combining the regulations for the storage and movement of raw celluloid and cinematograph films with those for other dangerous goods. We have not given close attention to these matters but we recommend that they be considered if any appreciable amendments to the regulations are contemplated.