Still Killing Us!

Our collapsed apartment building in To Kwa Wan is turning into a real mystery and I'm already all agog because there will be a police investigation into what happened.

Psychics, take heed! What the police are so suspicious about is the ten minute warning that minimised the death toll.

Seems two men who were renovating the ground floor came running out of the building screaming "Get out! It's going to collapse!" and then stood on the street screaming up at the apartments, bringing folks to their windows to tell them to get out immediately.  Since this is HK, where panic is honed to a fine art, most folks in the front apartments heeded the warning, ran around their floor hammering on surrounding doors and shouting for their neighbours to get out too, so it was a stampede down the stairs to the street, but by-standers who watched the collapse say there were a number of more intrepid souls who they saw come to their windows to see what was happening and who simply wafted away the screaming like it was beneath their notice. Grumpy old men and young mothers with sleeping babies! Those sorts!

And those are the folks who we're now seeing in the most offensive and gruesome photographs - HK really needs to stop doing that - although the English papers don't do it nearly as badly as the Chinese papers - being taken out of the rubble.

The up-side to HKers constant "Chicken Little-ing"?  Sometimes the sky does indeed fall on you.

Anyway, now the two kindly fellows who screamed to such great effect are the subject of a police investigation with the intent of bringing them up on a wrongful death charge.

Personally, I think they deserve a medal for all those lives they did save: Officers of The Order of Effective and Judicious Shrieking!

Of course, it's always possible it's something they did during their renovation that actually caused the collapse but I doubt it. I mean, what can you do on the ground floor that would bring down an entire apartment building?  I'm sure Al Qaeda would love an answer.

And the other interesting and notable incident in this is that one of the collapsed apartment-dwellers who stampeded to safety that night received a call from India saying his wife in India collapsed round the time of the building collapse and is now in hospital fighting for her life. Strange, huh?  But the poor fellow isn't allowed to go back to search through the rubble for his passport so he can't get back to her, although several Christian charities have come on board to attempt to facilitate a compassionate return home without one.

So are you too longing to know what happens with all this?  I'll follow the story for you and pass on the highlights.