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Cladding fall prompts call for mandatory building maintenance

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The government has been urged to introduce laws requiring regular maintenance of buildings after a large section of wall-cladding fell from an eight-year-old Sheung Wan high-rise on Friday night.

Building Department engineers yesterday inspected the site in Hollywood Road - a section of which was closed to drivers for several hours as a result - and found the building had no structural problems.

At 8.30pm on Friday, a 15-metre by three-metre slab of cladding fell 15 storeys from the Yee Hing Loong Commercial Building. No one was injured and no vehicles were damaged.

A Buildings Department spokesman said the building owners' contractor removed any remaining loose cladding yesterday and would inspect the wall further today.

The number of reports of dangerous buildings received by the department rose from 3,658 in 1997 to 6,671 last year. There were 1,110 cases in the first three months of this year.

Wong Wah-sang, associate professor of architecture at the University of Hong Kong, said Friday's incident was serious and there could be something wrong with the plastering of the tiles.

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