Specialized reclamation projects have been pushed ahead at many other spots. At North Point, on Hong Kong Island, 12,000 people live in tall apartments built on recently reclaimed land. The new City Hall opened in 1962 on reclaimed waterfront land in the Central District. Five blocks of the central waterfront, just west of the reclaimed land on which the Star Ferry’s Hong Kong Island terminal sits, are being extended several hundred feet into the harbor for more building sites. The principal land-fill operations have been restricted to the island and Kowloon Bay, except for Tseun Wan. The limitation has been human, rather than geographic; most urban workers can’t afford to travel to outlying locations and they don’t want to anyway. They plainly prefer the excitement, gossip and sociability of the crowded cities. Nevertheless, central reclamation possibilities are running out, unless the government proposes to pave its entire harbor. As a more likely alternative, it sent engineers out in 1957 to study reclamation sites in the bays and shallow inlets of the New Territories. Five have been tentatively chosen that could be developed to create 3,000 more acres of land. The cost would come to more than $83 million, so there’s no eagerness to tackle the project at once. The never-ending task of providing more land for the colony’s growing population would be meaningless without the assurance of an adequate water supply. At this stage in the colony’s development, even when the work of increasing the water supply is proceeding on a scale no previous generation would have attempted, the builders and planners are not deluding themselves. They know that when they have completed the last unit of the reservoir system under construction, the needs of the colony will probably have outstripped its capacity. There were times in the past when some optimistic governor, presiding at the opening of a new dam or reservoir, fancied that the problem had been met. The next drought was sufficient to knock his hopeful predictions into a cocked hat. Hong Kong has never been inclined to waste water. On the rare occasions when its people had a full supply, as in certain periods of 1958 and 1959, its maximum average consumption ran to about 88 million gallons a day for nearly 3,000,000 people. New York City, with just under 8,000,000 people, consumes about 1 billion 200 million gallons a day. Because of an unparalleled water-supply system, Americans are the world’s champion water-wasters. An American will use 100 gallons a day, compared with 27 gallons per person in Hong Kong, and about 50 gallons per person in Great Britain.