Hong Kong firefighters were called to Nathan Road last night after a metal rack supporting two air conditioning units suddenly broke, leaving the units dangling precariously from the side of a building.
On.cc reports that the external air con belonged to a ninth-floor unit inside a commercial building called Majestic House in Tsim Sha Tsui.
Photos posted on social media show the metal shelf meant to hold the air conditioning units had broken, causing the two external units to hang off.
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Firefighters blocked off a portion of neighboring Cameron Road, raised their ladders up to the side of the building, and secured the air cons before safely removing them.
Though the air cons in this case were removed before plummeting to the street below, the incident was nonetheless just the latest in long string of similar cases to stoke Hongkongers fears of random death from above.
Just Wednesday, a woman was arrested in connection with a window that fell from a building onto a busy street in Wan Chai. Meanwhile, two elderly women were injured, and a third woman arrested, after a window fell from a building in Sham Shui Po and crashed through the awning of a vegetable shop below just over a month ago. In January, a tourist was killed when a window fell on her from 16 stories up as she walked past a hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui.
Following that incident, a government official acknowledged that the Buildings Department had received 216 reports of windows falling from buildings aged 10 years or older since it began keeping track in 2016.
Unwilling to let falling windows grab all the headlines, an air conditioning unit also got in on the horrifying-freefall-from-a-great-height action in April. Not to be outdone by mere glass and metal, the unit was actually in flames when it fell, having been ignited by a fire raging in the apartment it was adjacent to.
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