a huge neon sign snapped

 

Building safety inpectors plan strike over manpower shortage (By Lai Ying-kit) Police close a section of Nathan Road near Soy Street in Mong Kok after after a cable holding a huge neon sign snapped, leaving it hanging precariously over the road. A group of Buildings Department workers are planning to go on strike on Thursday to protest against a shortage of manpower. The workers are responsible for inspecting building safety and demolishing dangerous structures. The Association of Government Technical and Survey Officers, which is organising the one-hour strike on Thursday at lunchtime, said the department had been severely understaffed for the past two years. The planned strike comes after the department reduced the number of contract workers by 300 while launching new a new territory-wide, check-up scheme, the association said on Tuesday. The association is demanding that the department hire 500 additional survey and technical officers to deal with the increased workload. The announcement of the strike comes one day after a cable holding a huge neon sign in Mong Kok snapped, leaving it hanging precariously over Nathan Road, disrupting traffic in the busy district for more than six hours. The nightclub responsible for the sign was ordered to remove it by the department in October last year. But the club operator ignored the order, prompting a warning to be issued in August. Liu Fuk-hing, a representative of the association, said the neon sign in Mong Kok was only one of many potentially dangerous structures where no action had been taken even though removal or maintenance orders had been issued. He said that this problem was a result of the shortage of manpower. He estimated that there were about 50,000 such cases to date. “Some of the cases have remained untouched for more than 10 years,” Liu said. “The situation is very bad.”