How Hong Kong’s MTR Corp ‘lost its focus’ – former construction head says embattled rail giant should return to serving public interest
Daniel Lam, who headed Housing Authority projects involving sites at train stations says past crisis response was swift and absolute, unlike now
There are not many things in Daniel Lam Chun’s life that have caused him sleepless nights, but the events of January 2000 are still vivid in the mind of the former chairman of the Housing Authority’s building committee.
At a press conference on January 8 that year, Lam revealed that the piling on two government-subsidised housing blocks in Yuen Chau Kok, Sha Tin, was 13 and 10 metres shorter than required.
The announcement involving the two 34-storey buildings came five days after authority staff had discovered the flaws during an inspection of 106 construction sites of public rental and subsidised flats.
“The inspection was actually initiated by the authority’s building committee,” Lam explained. “It was after we were informed the same problems had happened to the construction sites at Kowloon station and Hong Kong station.
“Soon after that, I was shown preliminary findings that uneven subsidence was found at one of our construction sites in Sha Tin, and the piles could be shorter than expected.
“While waiting for further review and confirmation, I could not sleep at all. About 1,000 secondary school students were studying in their campus, not less than six metres from our site. We didn’t know on which side the two housing blocks would fall, if they did.”
A bit of history repeating
The scandal came as then chief executive Tung Chee-hwa pledged to offer Hongkongers 85,000 new homes a year. Not long afterwards, the authority confirmed the short-piling problem had spread from MTR’s construction sites to at least four public housing sites – developments in which the same contractor was involved.