‘Grieving and exhausted’: Hong Kong fire victims call for centralised relief platform
‘Now all the information is here and there and we have to spend a lot of time searching and filling it in one by one,’ a survivor says
Victims of Hong Kong’s worst fire in decades have called for a unified platform to access funds and resources, as some elderly people say they feel “exhausted” having to travel around and repeatedly provide their personal information to different parties for support.
Several people who lost their homes in the Tai Po fire, which had claimed 156 lives as of Tuesday, said that while retrieving new identity cards and other documents from the Immigration Department was a smooth process, they faced difficulties navigating funds and other forms of support spread across various locations.
The department said on Monday that the first batch of 70 identity cards, more than 300 travel documents and certificates, as well as 112 travel permits and other papers issued by mainland Chinese authorities were available for collection at five locations from 1pm to 9pm.
David Wong, a 73-year-old retiree, arrived at the Church of Christ in China Fung Leung Kit Memorial Secondary School – formerly a shelter and now a service centre – to collect his new identity documents.
He was among 330 residents who took a designated shuttle bus to immigration headquarters in Tseung Kwan O on Saturday, after they had filled in their details earlier at nine shelters in Tai Po.
“I really appreciate their beyond-five-star service, which made the process of getting our new identity card and travel documents very smooth,” said Wong, who hoped such one-stop services could be expanded to other forms of resource distribution, such as cash funds.