HONG KONG — His helmet and safety belt securely in place, 35-year-old Ye Run-jin began his spidery climb up a 61-story apartment building forested with scaffolding of lashed bamboo.
Ye made it to only the third floor that day in June when he missed a step and plunged down an elevator shaft to his death.
Just six days earlier, bamboo scaffolding worker Lam Chi-lung, 22, took a step outside the sixth floor of another building and became a casualty of one of Hong Kong's deadliest jobs.
In tiny Hong Kong, land fit for development is scarce, so property companies build straight up, filling the horizon with towering high-rises.
When buildings are under construction or under repair, they are shrouded in poles of bamboo scaffolding--which cuts costs and speeds construction. Contractors elsewhere in Asia see it as an outdated hazard.
It is a frequent sight that can startle: workers climbing among rickety-looking poles that creak beneath their weight, up and down through a bamboo grid many stories aboveground, often wearing little or no safety equipment.
"It shows our courage if we do not use a safety belt, and we guys love that," said Wong Kan-kwun, 45, a bamboo scaffolding worker for 28 years.
Contractors say bamboo as a natural material is unbeatable in terms of flexibility, cost and time, so they use it on 90% of buildings here. Bamboo used in one scaffolding job can be reused, but only once. It is also plentiful in nearby mainland China, where the scaffolding is used only on low-rise projects, structural engineer Poon Sun-wah said.
Many other Asian builders use steel, which is more expensive but safer. Contractors in Japan and Malaysia say they have avoided bamboo for decades because of safety concerns.
"It is too soft to be used as scaffolding--a lot of injuries can happen," said P. Raguvaran, who runs a construction firm in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. "Wooden scaffolding was used up to two years back, but now we use steel because it is much safer, especially for tall buildings."
In places where some bamboo is still used, such as India, the Philippines and Thailand, the builders don't go quite so high as in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong workers used bamboo poles--more than 100,000 of them--when they built the territory's tallest skyscraper, the 78-story Central Plaza office tower, according to Flord So, who oversaw the scaffolding work.
