No_3_October_1964 — Page 85

action needed guard life'

Government Building Authority experts declared this building unsafe and ordered its evacuation. It collapsed shortly afterwards. The building, in Pak Tze Lane, had load bearing brick walls and timber floor. ▼

dangerous when any part of it is liable to collapse and pull down the remainder or a part of the remainder of the building, with it. The most frequent offenders in this respect are the rear kitchen blocks of old tene- ment buildings,

The second question is a little more involved, in that the reasons for a building becoming dangerous are many and varied. In the first instance, many of the old tenement buildings were put up by speculators who cared little or nothing about standards of construction or the provision of the right sort of materials, and subsequent maintenance of the fabric of such buildings has been conspicuous by its absence. Some tenement buildings were built with reinforced concrete frames (using sea water as mixing water for the concrete), which to- gether with the lack of compaction of the concrete nas caused extensive rusting of the reinforcing steel, and hence the widely evident spalling of the concrete cover (the first sign of danger in a reinforced concrete fraine).

Others were built with load bear- ing brick or stone walls and China fir pole floors, in many cases either with no proper bonding of the brickwork or a very poor clay mortar as jointing. These walls are now be- ginning to crumble and crack, the first sign of danger being cracking of plaster, but only too frequently such plaster cracks are cut out and flushed up while the deterioration continues relentlessly.

Again, building land has always been in short supply in Hong Kong. and the Colony has always had to

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