Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1954-1955 — Page 26

avoided through the progress of clearance and resettlement measures. This is not to say that there could not still be two or three serious squatter fires, each involving, say, five thousand persons, and many smaller ones; but at the end of the period under review it was safe to say at least that no future squatter fire could represent such a serious catastrophe as the fire at Shek Kip Mei. The Shek Kip Mei disaster had been by far the biggest fire of all, and it is proper to place on record a brief account of the measures taken to rehouse the persons who lost their homes in that fire, even though some of the events recorded took place before the beginning of the 1954-55 financial year.

25. At the beginning of the calendar year 1954 there were over 27,000 victims of the Shek Kip Mei squatter fire encamped in temporary shelters on the streets of the nearby Shamshuipo district. The remainder of the persons who had lost their homes, estimated at 26,000, had contrived to make their own arrangements either by renting alternative accommodation or by staying with friends and relations. A vast programme of direct relief was under way, and the first units of temporary emergency accommodation were completed

were completed on the site of the fire in February, 1954. The policy was to build temporary two-storey and three-storey buildings as quickly as possible for those fire- victims who had found no alternative but to camp out on the streets, and to rehouse in eight permanent six-storey buildings those whose needs were not so immediate.

26. Until July, 1954, this programme proceeded according to plan. In March about one thousand squatters lost their huts in a fire at Tsun Wan, but these were rehoused during the summer in a newly opened resettlement area at Tai Wo Hau, Tsun Wan. Good progress was made with the clearance of fire-lanes and there seemed no reason to suppose that all urgent fire lane clearances would not be completed by 1st October, 1954 accord- ing to plan. The most important of these, the clearance of five wide lanes through the Tai Hang Tung squatter area, which lay north of the Boundary Street polo ground, was to have been carried out during August and the preparatory work was virtually completed by mid-July. But on 22nd July, 1954 the whole Tai Hang Tung area was burnt out in the third largest

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