ENG-1959 — Page 17

4

HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT

unable even to keep up with her own population expansion, much less improve the lot of her citizens in the years that lie ahead?

The various chapters, year by year, of these Annual Reports contain the detailed record of past achievement and this chapter cannot fully recapitulate all that has been done. But we are here more concerned to show the scale of the effort that Hong Kong has put forth, and this can be done with comparatively few repre- sentative figures—although some figures are of course unavoidable. Since any Government must deal with essentials first, it is proposed to illustrate Hong Kong's effort by reference to four essentials : water supply, housing, education and health services.

The prominence given to water supply in the foregoing list may be puzzling to some readers. The reason is that there are no rivers and only a few large streams in the Colony. In consequence, the water needs of the Colony depend upon collecting and-storing rainwater by systems of catchwaters and reservoirs, of which the bulk are in the New Territories (none of the Colony's water supplies come from China, as is often mistakenly supposed). This would be a sufficient problem alone, but it is complicated by the fact that the great bulk of the rainfall occurs in the five summer months May to September; and in these five months sufficient water must be impounded to last throughout the winter. Since reservoirs are costly and take time to build, the Colony has always been short of water, and a restricted supply has been the rule rather than the exception throughout its history. The rapid increase in population has naturally exaggerated these difficulties: moreover, as dwellers in hillside shacks move in increasing num- bers to resettlement estates and other organized housing, they cease collecting their water from casual hillside streams and springs and draw water off the piped and purified supply. New sources of supply to supplement the total storage of 4,647 million gallons available in 1946 became an urgent need, and in 1951 the Government decided to construct a new 4,507 million gallon reservoir at Tai Lam Chung, with its associated catchments, reticulation systems and purification plant. This new project took some 6 years to complete and cost a total of approximately $134 million but even before it was completed it became apparent that further measures were necessary. During 1959, therefore, work started on yet another new reservoir at Shek Pik on Lantau