TSING Yi South Bridge gets hit more often than a heavyweight title defender. Recently, it was by a barge which had a mast nearly a metre too tall. Bridges are rare nautical novelties for Hongkong bargemen. A gas line to Tsing Yi was severed and residents claimed to be cut off for hours.
This was a rich irony for Tsing Yians. Nearly 200,000 people are snuggled in with 12,400 cubic tonnes of liquid petroleum gas stored in a variety of spheres laid out in cathedral clusters from north to south, but no one could get their gas water-heater kick started.
Tsing Yi appears in the papers often and sometimes every day if there is a particularly gaseous story running. You can always rely on Tsing Yians to be complaining about something. The reading mind is cluttered by pipes, smeared by oil and clogged with visions of diesel-clouded trucks stuck on a bridge.
In print, Tsing Yi can be a page turner, but add it all up and it is a science fiction picture of a future dedicated to eco-hell and fat capitalists in over striped suits chewing oval cigars overlooking a labyrinth of metal chimneys.
Forget Harlem, South Los Angeles or Moss Side, Manchester. Tsing Yi is one of the most inflammatory neighbourhoods in the world, a cross between Canvey Island and Daya Bay with people. There are as many resident protest groups as mahjong games. It would be a perfect destination for American writer P.J. O'Rourke if he chose a follow-up to his bestseller Holidays in Hell.
In the past six months, a casual newspaper reader would have found out that on Tsing Yi a cement factory was causing respiratory problems on an adjacent housing estate, a liquid petroleum gas pipe in a storage terminal leaked, oil tankers have parked forthe night in front of blocks of flats, three container trucks overturned on pavements in 10 days, a plan was made known to store plane fuel, and a three-year-long land reclamation delayed the relocation of two oil terminals near a housing estate.