469
few years owing to the continued increase in consumption, and you have recently approved of the construction of the first portion of a scheme for obtaining water from the Shing Mun River in the New Territories. This work alone will take several years to complete. As the population of the Colony, especially of the Kowloon Peninsula, continues to increase, it will eventually be necessary to proceed with the further portions of the scheme but this is a matter for the future. In the Island of Hongkong new catchment areas are being brought into use, but the distribution on an economic basis of the increased supply of water thus effected to parts of the island now being developed for the first time, is a problem that will require very careful consideration. The Pokfulum district, the area. which includes Aberdeen and the Island of Aplichau, the Deep Water Bay district, Repulse Bay, the Stanley district, Taitam Bay and finally the Sheko district at the extreme eastern end of the island will all require considerable supplies of water in the near future, and one of the difficulties to be faced is that these supplies will not all be required at or near sea level, but in some places at a height of several hundred feet above sea level. The configuration of the island does not admit of the construction except at a prohibitive cost of further impounding reservoirs of sufficient size at any great height and it is probable that service tanks filled by pumping will be necessary at various points.
7.
It has also become clear that in order to combat the tendency to waste water it will be necessary to devise some method of metering the supplies to Chinese tenement houses and business premises, and it is not improbable that whatever scheme is adopted will be opposed by a section of the community that has become accustomed to an unlimited supply in return for the payment of a very
moderate tax.
8.