Jockey Club has sinking feeling at Sha Tin stables
A state-of-the-art training centre in Guangzhou is the integral component of the Hong Kong Jockey Club's grand plan to secure the future of local horse racing, but everyone has been left, quite literally, with a sinking feeling at their stables in Sha Tin.
At present 1,200 horses are stabled at Sha Tin. Some are housed in recently built Olympic stables while the rest are kept in older accomodation built on reclaimed land in the 1970s.
However, the sands of time has seen the land sink - by as much as one-and-a-half metres in places.
Owners and trainers, however, need not fear their prized thoroughbreds disappearing into a horsey quicksand in the coming months. The it's not superstructure that is going down - it's the land around the buildings.
When land reclamations took place 30 or 40 years ago in Hong Kong, the engineering approach was a lot less scientific than it is today. Back then, the method was to push the material into the sea and displace the mud - it's this marine mud that's the problem.
It takes years to squeeze the water out of the mud. Essentially, reclamation means you are putting additional weight on top of an existing soil layer. If it's sand, it is very compactable. It drains freely and the water gets squeezed out quickly. But if it's mud or clay this only happens over a long period of time, so the land sinks as the water comes out slowly.
This phenomenon has steadily been happening for a number of years at the club's Sha Tin stables. However, the club describes it as a manageable problem.
'Yes, in the worst examples some land has sunk down to as much as one-and-a-half metres, but that's over 30 to 40 years or so,' the club's director of property, Michael Moir, said.
'As far as Sha Tin is concerned, the bulk of the movement has taken place over a long time. It happens at inches per year so it's a slow process. This has easily been rectified over time when it has needed to be.'
Moir explained that there's been habitual relaying of drains and filling in of soil around the buildings to form ramps up to the stables. It has not taken vast sums of money to sort the problem out. The daily operation of the stables was never affected, Moir said.
A structural engineer by profession, Moir is an experienced property specialist. He only joined the club in March, but previously spent 18 years with Swire properties, specialising in large capital projects.
'I'm sure the sewage plant next door to our Sha Tin stables has had some problems over the years too, but even a modern reclamation will settle or sink a little,' Moir explained.
'It's really not a major problem in Hong Kong at all, bearing in mind how much of the territory is actually built on reclamation land. Generally speaking, they have done a great job here. In Wan Chai, the original shoreline was Queen's Road East. Wan Chai was built in about four or five reclamations to where it is today. Reclamation has been the lifeblood of Hong Kong. Sha Tin just happens to be not a very good example. It's something the club has had to deal with since it was built.'
There are no such worries about the club's new training centre, which will be at Conghua, 40 kilometres northeast of Guangzhou. When finished, it will cover 152 hectares and be built for an estimated cost of more than HK$1 billion.
The first phase of construction should be complete by 2014, and the expected date for the whole project to finish is 2017.
Horses home
The number of racehorses that the Hong Kong Jockey Club has stabled at Sha Tin: 1,200
