Sessional_Paper_1885-1886 — Page 101

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This original estimate of £259,000 submitted as far back as 1873, has since passed through many and very considerable changes, figuring at a much smaller sum and then rising again, according to the curtailments or the extensions which at one time and another the original design has undergone between the years 1873 and 1883.

In 1875, a year of unprecedented commercial depression in the Colony, not- withstanding that in addition to a comparatively empty Treasury, the Government had before it the heavy prospective outlay of a new Praya wall to replace that destroyed in the memorable typhoon of the previous year, the Legislative Council felt that it could no longer postpone action in respect of the defective water-supply of the town. Looking however to the Colonial resources as they then stood, the Government were only able to agree to the expedient of adopting the Tytam project in a very reduced and modified form. The proposed dam was not to be so high, and the volume of water to be impounded was to be less. The larger conduit was to be substituted by a smaller iron pipe; the service reservoir in town was to be dispensed with, the subsidiary supply from wayside feeders was to be relinquished, and many other minor adjuncts considered in the first scheme indispensable to an efficient water-supply, and since revived, were to be given up, for the time, the intention being to revert to them and add them to the scheme later, as means allowed. The reduced cost of this very extensive and unsparing abridgement of the original project was approximately calculated at £122,600, of which amount £72,600 represented the reduced dam and reservoir, and £50,000 the cost of making the tunnel and laying the pipes in order to conduct the water as far as the town mains at Bowrington. We have here therefore a contraction of the estimate from £259,000 to £122,600, or less than half. I should not omit to mention however, that the £122,600 underwent a slight revision almost imme- diately afterwards in connection with some small matters of detail which brought it up to £124,000.

At this time it was also conceived that while it would be of material help in augmenting the supply, it would avert any undue straining of the slender resources of the Colony, if for the present the Tytam stream only were diverted and brought to Victoria, leaving the more important and expensive undertaking of building the dam and making a storage reservoir to some future period when the new Praya wall having been finished and paid for, the Government would be in a better position to meet new liabilities, and this view of the matter having been put before the Secretary of State in 1876, by Mr. GARDINER AUSTIN, then administering the Government, the EARL OF CARNARVON who at that time held the Seals of the Colonial Department, assented to this arrangement of dividing the work into two separate instalments and in the following year sanctioned the expenditure of £50,000 for bringing the Tytam stream to Bowrington. At this point the dam and reservoir works having been indefinitely postponed the estimate shed another £74,000 and stood at the £50,000 sanctioned by the Secretary of State.

After 1877 however, no action was taken in respect of the proposed new water-works until 1882. In 1882 the urgent requirements of the Chinese population and the no less urgent demands of the Public Health caused the Government seriously to consider the wisdom of reverting, not to the abridgement, but to the original project in its integrity, a course now rendered feasible by the improved financial position of the Colony and by its consequently improved credit, in the event of its electing to carry out the work, with borrowed money and throwing on successive relays of future colonists the burthen of the payment.

At this stage also matters were quickened by the official report addressed to Her Majesty's Government by the Sanitary Commissioner Mr. CHADWICK, on the subject of the deplorable water famine which prevailed among the poorer classes of Hongkong every successive winter, and of the grave sanitary dangers involved in such a condition of things.

The attention of the Colonial Office being now fully directed to the sanitary state of Hongkong and to the inadequacy of its water-supply, the EARL OF KIMBERLEY at once approved of the Tytam project being carried into execution in its original completeness, and happening to be at that time in England, I was called upon to place myself in communication with Sir ROBERT RAWLINSON the Consulting Engineer to the Imperial Government, with a view to a revision of the plans of 1873, and to the completion of such arrangements as would give early effect to the decision of the Secretary of State.

In the conferences which ensued with Sir ROBERT RAWLINSON in this connec- tion, the first and most notable change made in the earlier designs was one which at once very seriously increased the estimate of cost by £34,000, and this was the