Construction of the dam, pipelines, tunnels, and catchwaters became an international venture, with French, English, American, and Hong Kong contractors sharing the work under supervision of government engineers. The entire $40 million job is to be completed late in 1963. There were no claims that the completion of Shek Pik would give the colony all the water it required. The new dam on Lantau and the water pumped in from China would be helpful, but far short of indicated needs. Two factors balanced each other in planning further exploitation of the colony’s water resources. More reservoirs of the type already in use would displace more farmland than Hong Kong could afford to lose. But the introduction of grouting, the foundation technique successfully employed at Shek Pik, made it possible to consider reservoir sites which would have seemed ridiculously unsuitable a few years earlier. And these sites, it appeared, could be developed without invading farm areas. In the late 1950s, engineers of the Public Works Department and two consulting firms directed their search for more water toward the thinly settled scrub country of the eastern New Territories. This part of the colony consists of two peninsulas with the irregular outline of an ink-blot, separated by the broad, ten-mile-long Tolo Channel. Both peninsulas are chopped into by dozens of deep bays, coves and inlets bordered by high, rocky hills. Hundreds of inshore fishermen ply the surrounding waters, but most of the region is too barren and mountainous for farming. Survey engineers made two recommendations which startled laymen: (1) Build a 6,600-foot-long dam across the entrance of Plover Cove, a four-square-mile inlet from Tolo Channel, and cut it off from the sea. (2) Build a similar but much shorter dam to seal off Hebe Haven, an inlet about one-fourth as large as Plover Cove. When the dams were finished all that would be necessary would be to pump the seawater out of the inlets and let the rains fill them with fresh water. The two reservoirs would be enough to double the storage capacity of the colony’s water-supply system.