The report into the outbreak of atypical pneumonia at Amoy Gardens - although not the outbreak itself - is a kind of good news. It concluded that the tragic spread of the disease was not caused by the virus being either air- or water-borne. Instead, a unique combination of factors was responsible for infecting more than 300 residents, about 40 per cent of them from one block.
It started with the contamination of the sewerage by a Sars patient suffering diarrhoea. A broken pipe then allowed droplets carrying the virus to move up the floors through the light well and into the bathrooms of other households through open windows and drains, whose seals failed to function because they were left dry.
But it is also worrying news, for there really is nothing unique about the drainage problems highlighted. The design of Amoy Gardens' plumbing, down to the minute details of the shapes and sizes of the pipes, drains and light wells, is commonplace in Hong Kong. It is not inherently defective. All it took, and might still take, to precipitate a disaster is for one or more of its components to go wrong.
Unfortunately, as many residents of Hong Kong's multi-storey residential buildings can tell from personal experience, faulty sewers and drains are problems that bedevil them. They are but one of many issues that constantly tax the patience of building managers, who have great difficulty getting owners and tenants to agree to making 'costly' repairs of broken pipes. In the light of Amoy Gardens, such repairs will seem cheap.
As a typical housing block has hundreds of units, the issue of whether the responsibility for fixing a broken pipe should fall on the owner of the flat next to the leak or on all owners whose flats share usage of the pipe is often not a straightforward matter, either in law or in practice.
The government has done a lot to improve building management by helping residents to form owners' corporations. But about 8,000 old buildings still do not have them. Those that have formed one often have difficulty finding willing owners to take on the thankless task of becoming office-bearers, with the onerous duty of keeping building managers on their toes and mediating between unco-operative owners and tenants. It would be a most positive development if the Sars outbreak forces the public to realise that poor maintenance of public facilities can have disastrous health implications.