After the end of the Second World War, more than one million refugees flocked to Hong Kong throughout the time of the Chinese Civil War. With the surge of population, those who could not afford ordinary housing were forced to sleep out or build up squatter houses around the town, playing neighbours with the stone houses of the walled villages. As the number of squatter houses mushroomed, large squatter areas emerged one after another. Around Kai Tak, for example, they were found in Kowloon Walled City, Tung Tau Tsuen, Sai Tau Tsuen, Ho Man Tin and Diamond Hill. Squatter houses were usually wooden, with one or two storey. There was no water or electricity supply or sewage treatment facility, and with the narrow alleys one could have imagined the dismal sanitary and hygienic condition in the squatter area. Squatters, moreover, had their property and life under threat every day, fearing for fire and wind as they kept in store a great quantity of cooking utensils and inflammable materials. Fire was particularly frequent. On the night of 25 December 1953, a fire in Shek Kip5 Mei devastated the entire squatter settlement and 50,000 squatters were turned homeless in a flash. This tragedy pushed the government to launch the squatter clearance programme alongside the building of resettlement estates in several districts abutting Kai Tak, including Kowloon City, Wang Tau Hom, Tiger Rock, Diamond Hill and Jordon Valley. As Kai Tak was considerably extended in the 1950s and the addition of runways had made a change to flight paths, several resettlement estates, such as Lei Cheng Uk, Shek Kip Mei and Tai Hang at the foothill along Tai Po Road and Kwun Tong and Sau Mau Ping in the east of Kowloon, found themselves right under the flight paths, and residents there became very close friends of the aeroplanes.