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Governor's transcript
Following is the transcript of the remarks made by the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten, after visiting the fire victims at Princess Margaret Hospital this (Tuesday) afternoon:
Governor: This has been another bad and sad day in Hong Kong. In not much more than a year, we have seen terrible fires. We have seen a fire in one of our country parks, we have seen a fire in a commercial building, a terrible fire in a karaoke bar, and now a very serious fire in a block of residential flats. Each time one of these tragedies happens, the whole community asks how we can prevent anything like it happening again. But we never seem to do quite enough. We appear to be chasing after these tragedies rather than preventing them happening.
Today, as you know, as a result of the fire 45 people have been brought to this excellent hospital and two other of our excellent hospitals. Of those 45, seven people have died and there are two who are in intensive-care.
I would like to, straightaway, thank once again our hard-pressed medical staff and social workers for the way, once again, that they are coping with this disaster. And obviously, I would like to thank the Fire Services for what they did so promptly to try to deal with this tragedy.
We spent this morning, in the Executive Council, among other things examining a series of proposals on fire-safety which will be emerging in the coming weeks, not least when we give evidence to the LegCo Panel next week. We legislate - we finished one bill in March and we are already trying to tighten it up. We are looking at questions like the licensing of karaoke bars, we are looking at what more can be done by government departments to tighten-up fire-safety standards.
There is, obviously, a huge job of public education to do. One of the proposals we were looking at this morning was how we can provide more public education, about what people need to do in their own homes and in their own blocks of flats. But it does appear - though of course we won't know the major causes of the tragedy until the Fire Services have completed their report it does appear as though one of the reasons for the scale of this disaster was that some of the fire-doors were left open rather than closed. Now that is one of the basic fire-safety measures which everybody has got to take in their own lives, in their own blocks of flats. So many of these things are known, so many of these things people understand, but then don't bother to do.
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