"Bamboo is cheap, lightweight, and strong enough to withstand the city's many typhoons and tropical storms. Hundreds of bamboo poles can often be seen lashed together on the side of a modern office tower. Buildings or housing estates like the one in Tai Po district encased in bamboo during significant renovation projects are not a rare sight in the city-state. Sometimes, the scaffolding can remain up for a year or more."
"Bamboo scaffolding is built by speciality workers known as spiders. They lash together bamboo poles to build intricate grid-like scaffolding that is then typically covered in additional netting to catch construction materials. While the use of bamboo has faded in other parts of Asia, it has been hard to replace it completely in Hong Kong, even with options such as metal scaffolding, said experts."
At least 55 people have died and hundreds remain missing after a deadly fire at a Tai Po housing estate in Hong Kong, with bamboo scaffolding likely accelerating the blaze. Bamboo scaffolding remains widely used because it is cheap, lightweight, and strong enough to withstand typhoons and tropical storms. Specialist workers known as spiders lash hundreds of poles into grid-like structures and cover them with netting. Scaffolding can remain on buildings for months or more during renovations. Bamboo endures in Hong Kong because it is faster, cheaper, and more flexible than metal alternatives in narrow urban sites, but its combustibility and prevalence are now under scrutiny.
Read at www.aljazeera.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]