They stand out as eyesores, attached to the outside walls of thousands of Hong Kong highrises. Clothes lines - some crudely constructed from bamboo and string, more modern ones from aluminium and nylon - are often a nuisance, gathering dust and, when full, dripping water on to the heads of passers-by below.
But, if you ask Lo Kwai-ngor, a mother of two who lives on the 13th floor of a Tseung Kwan O public housing estate, these seemingly single-purpose clothes lines are also life-savers.
She credits the ones hanging on the 10th and seventh floors of her building with having slowed the descent of her three-year-old, Lau Tim, who had stumbled out of an open window while her mother was outside.
'I climbed up the stool and crawled outside the window to look for mummy, and, oooh. . .,' says the toddler.
She runs her finger down the graphic picture produced by a Chinese newspaper of the accident scene. 'The picture got it wrong. I fell right through - not outside the clothes lines.' Lau Tim dived, head first, through two clothes lines, on November 7, somehow missing the four steel bars that kept them in place.
Fortunately, too, the lines on the seventh floor that day were packed with freshly washed laundry as the tenant had just returned from Canada with bags of washing. Usually the lines were empty - and if they had been nothing would have broken Lau Tim's fall.
When Lau Tim struck the corrugated metal canopy on the first-floor level, it flexed, absorbing much of her impact.
