Hong Kong Construction

We recently had to have one of our air conditioners worked on. Since we are nine floors in the air, the technician couldn't simply bring his tool box and get to work. Instead, we had to first schedule a crew to install scaffolding. For an isoluated repair such as ours, they don't install scaffolding from the ground up, but drill into the exterior wall of the building to put up bracing (a very, very loud exercise), then install the scaffolding. Ours looked like this:



Yes, that is bamboo you see. This is nothing unusual in Hong Kong. Bamboo is the scaffolding material of choice in here (in fact, I've never seen anything else used). It's absolutely everywhere.



Surprisingly, it is durable enough to support construction workers and their equipment. And, it seems to go up in no time at all - even on the tallest of buildings.

The bamboo sticks are held together with simple binding:

Netting is used to prevent debris from falling:
And there are brave workers who specialize in its installation.

When the construction work is done, the scaffolding is taken down and reused.

This is just one more thing in Hong Kong that I'm getting so accustomed to seeing that I hardly notice. More of these items to come...