Despite the anxious anticipation of residents living in and around 45J Ma Tau Wai Road, the Buildings Department took almost three months before it finally published its report on the building's collapse. It is a pity that the report, like a child's "play with mud and sand", contains nothing of solid substance, not even a clear record of the most basic facts, even less the answer to the question "who shall be held responsible?" The only comment I can offer about that report is, "It makes nothing clear, evades the question of who is responsible and is entirely disappointing and unacceptable." The only conclusion from the inspection, which served as the basis for the report, is "further investigation has to be conducted". Is this self-derision or black humor?

What angers people most is that the 3-month effort resulted in little more than the conclusion that "column C13, which was affected and damaged by some external forces, may have caused the collapse of the building". This report fully reveals the working style of the Buildings Department as ineffectually bureaucratic. At a Legislative Council Panel meeting to discuss the issue of building safety, the report on the collapse was severely criticized for the carelessness and perfunctoriness of its preparation and rejected by most as unacceptable. The report points out that the damage that a column suffered from "external forces" triggered a chain reaction that finally caused the collapse. But what were the "external forces"? What was the cause of the chain reaction that caused the collapse? The report gives no answer at all to those questions.

Why are doubts not cleared? One needs only to look to the content of the repair order issued for the building by the Building Department on 13 January. Paragraph 6(b) of the report points out that before the building at 45J Ma Tau Wai Road collapsed on 29 January, repair work and the dismantling of unauthorized structures were underway. Were the items cited by the repair order connected with the ultimate collapse of the building? The Director of Buildings however, in an indifferent manner, told the Legislative Council there was no reliable information as to what works were being carried out at that time of the January 13 report.

The "Report on Inspection of Buildings Aged 50 or Above" which was released at the same time as the investigation report shows that the districts with the largest number of buildings over 50 years old and needing repair are Kowloon City, Yau Tsin Mong and Sham Shui Po, most within Kowloon West. This second report shows that the problem of old buildings is very serious, demanding that the government face it squarely. Minor repairs and maintenance cannot get to the root of the problem. A tragedy similar to the incident at building 45J could occur at any time when there is a failure to implement policy and/or building repairs. It is time for the government to find out what is wrong with the present government bureaucracy in charge of building safety. Is it a problem of work style, shortage of staff or incompetence? We must identify the problems. Only by so doing can we know how to thoroughly avoid a recurrence of the 45J tragedy!

The author is a Legislative Council member and associate professor of Law at the City University of Hong Kong.

(HK Edition 05/27/2010 page1)