Q 25
81. Maintenance of Water Works:-A constant supply was maintained throughout the year compared with 223 days in 1936.
The Jubilee Reservoir was officially opened by His Excellency the Governor Sir Andrew Caldecott K.C.M.G. on 30th January.
The effective capacity of this reservoir was rechecked and found to be 2,921.00 million gallons, which figure was adopted from 1st January 1938. In September, soon after the reservoir had filled, defects at Pineapple Pass Dam were observed. It was found that the dam had deflected a maximum of eight inches downstream and that leakage amounting to 200,000 gallons per day was taking place. Considerable settlement of the earth embankment and movement of the rock fill backing had taken place, and it was considered advisable to cable the Consulting Engineers. Mr. Binnie arrived in the Colony on October 26th and made several inspections. He requested that certain investigations be made to enable him to decide on remedial measures. This was done, but no decision had been reached by the end of the year. Leakage at the end of the year, when the reservoir was eighteen feet below overflow level, had decreased to 70,000 gallons per day.
The third section of the Paterson Rapid Gravity Filtration Plant at Shek Li Pui was completed and brought into use in July. The total capacity of this plant is now fifteen million gallons per day. The second 24" trunk main from Shek Li Pui to Waterloo Road was also completed early in the year and greatly improved distribution.
3,677.87 million gallons were delivered into the Reception Reservoir from Jubilee Reservoir and Smuggler's Pass Intake, but a percentage of this amount could not be stored and ran to waste over the Byewash Reservoir spillway.
A total of 5,019.90 million gallons was filtered, of which 1,386.52 were filtered by the slow sand beds, and the remaining 3,633.38 million gallons by the Paterson Rapid Gravity Plant at Shek Li Pui; of the latter quantity, 1,560.23 million gallons were supplied to Hong Kong.
The total quantity of water supplied to Kowloon was 3,362.82 million gallons (exclusive of 96.33 million gallons supplied to water boats at Lai Chi Kok), which gives an average daily consumption of 9.21 million gallons or 24.2 gallons per head per day based on an estimated population of 380,000. Details are given in Table IX.
The quantity of water stored in the impounding reservoirs on 1st January was 2,050.04 million gallons, and a minimum of 703.16 million gallons was reached on 17th May, when there were 376.00 million gallons in Jubilee Reservoir.