Our Community
Dirty, stinky alleys are back
"We haven't received order to carry out regular checks to the rear lane of 18- 20 Fuk Wing Street," Mr Chan said.
A spokeswoman for the FEHD, meanwhile, declined to comment on the latest situation of the black spots.
She just said the department conducted daily cleaning at the problematic spots identified by Varsity.
But the government is being criticised
for giving priority to improve the hygiene
conditions of locations that are obvious
and have been complained by the public.
"The government will only concern about the matter when there are complaints," said Mr Tang, the Sha Tin district councillor.
One of the black spots that is more noticeable to the public and has kept clean is the rear lane of 9-13 Tung Choi Street in Mong Kok, a crowded district popular for shopping.
"Police and inspectors (from the FEHD) patrol here everyday," said a shoes hawker in Tung Choi Street.
The hawker, who only gave her name
as Ms Yu, said the uneven ground surface
was smoothed out and items abandoned
in the lane were removed.
"It is much cleaner than before. There
has been no disgusting smell since 2003,"
she said.
To improve the city's hygiene, the
chairman of the Legislative Council's
food safety and environmental hygiene
panel, Tommy Cheung Yu-yan, said the
public should play their role and be more
aware of the cleanliness problems.
"Improving hygiene conditions should be a culture of the community, and that relies on public cooperation," the lawmaker said. "After all, the public is the best inspector for the government."
The progress of the government's cleaning effort was said to be "satisfactory" in a report issued by the Audit Commission in 2005, with over 95 per cent of the black spots identified before November 2003 having been eradicated.
But today, some black spots have reappeared. Hygiene problems have also been found prevailing in a side lane of 18-20 Fuk Wing Street in Sham Shui Po, apart from that in the rear lane of Tsuen Nam Road in Tai Wai. This is despite the fact that the site was removed from the black spot list in 2004.
Construction materials were seen
piling up on the lane while refuse was
discarded all over the lane. The ground
was damp with water dribbling from
clogged drains in the buildings.
Leung Lai, vice chairman of the Sham
Shui Po District Council, said dribbling
was the most serious problem of the lane
and the persisted dripping had weakened
the wall structure and caused cracks in
the walls.
"There was no such situation in 2003 when the government focused on
eradicating the hygiene black spots," Mr
Leung said.
In 2003, government departments had cleared the stagnant water, removed the dumps and fixed the broken drains, according to the Home Affairs Department.
Mr Leung blamed the deteriorated
hygiene on the fading memory of SARS
and a drop in public awareness. The public
might have accepted filthiness as a normal
condition of rear lanes and they would
not complain unless they were affected
by problems like the breeding of
mosquitoes, the district councillor said.
Chan Kam-tao, owner of the hardware store in Fuk Wing Street, said he did not worry about the possibility of contracting diseases that might be caused by the unsatisfactory hygiene condition. He found it normal for the lane to be filthy.
"It has been like this for ages. It (the measure of Team Clean) has not helped much. It (hygiene condition) is more or less the same in these shabby areas," he said.
A FEHD health inspector of cleaning
in the district, Cheung Suk-fun, said her
office would only carry out investigation
when a complaint was received. And there have been no complaints
about the lane's hygiene, according to
Chan Tat-wing, senior health inspector of
the environmental hygiene section at the
Sham Shui Po District Environment
Hygiene Office.
Construction materials and loads of paper for recycle are
discarded all over the damp lane of Fuk Wing Street in
Sham Shui Po.