HONG KONG— Hong Kong’s deadliest fire in decades has raised questions about corruption and negligence in the renovations of the apartment complex where at least 128 people died.
An intense fire broke out at Wang Fuk Court complex in Hong Kong’s northern suburbs Wednesday afternoon, with flames covering seven of the eight towers. The complex was home to some 4,800 residents, some of whom had raised safety concerns about the renovations more than year before the fire.
Police on Wednesday arrested three men from a construction company on suspicion of manslaughter and gross negligence. They were released on bail but then arrested by the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the authority said Saturday night, pointing to their leadership role in the renovations. ICAC had also previously arrested seven men and one woman associated with the project.
Police have not identified the company where the suspects worked, but documents posted to the homeowners association’s website showed that the Prestige Construction & Engineering Company was in charge of renovations. Police have seized boxes of documents from the company, where phones rang unanswered Thursday.
Officials also said they were investigating the materials used, both the netting on the scaffolding and the foam panels covering windows, and their role in the blaze.
Residents found safety issues a year before fire
For almost a year, some residents at the Wang Fuk Court complex had been raising safety concerns to Hong Kong authorities about the scaffolding materials being used in the renovation project, according to documents reviewed by the AP, specifically about the netting that covered the scaffolding.
Hong Kong’s labor department in a statement on Saturday confirmed it had received such complaints, adding that officials had carried out 16 inspections of Wang Fuk Court’s renovation project since July 2024, and had warned contractors multiple times in writing that they must ensure they met fire safety requirements. The city even carried out an inspection as late as one week before the fire.
The labor department said it had reviewed the product quality certificate of the netting and that it was in line with standards, but that the safety netting had not been the previous target of inspections.
Preliminary investigations showed the fire started on a lower-level scaffolding net of one of the buildings. It then spread rapidly as the foam panels caught fire, said Chris Tang, the city’s secretary for security. Police also said they had been looking at the highly flammable foam panels.
“The blaze ignited the foam panels, causing the glass to shatter and leading to a swift intensification of the fire and its spread into the interior spaces,” Tang said.
The labor department said later on Saturday that three prosecutions were brought against the company over breaches of safety regulations for working at height in the construction and convictions in two of the cases resulted in fines of totaling 30,000 Hong Kong dollars ($3,850). The company also was fined three times in 2023 for separate violations unrelated to the Tai Po project.
First responders also found that some fire alarms in the complex, which housed many older people, did not sound when tested, said Andy Yeung, the director of Hong Kong Fire Services. He did not specify how many were not working or if any of the others were.
Intense blaze took days to put out
It took firefighters a day to bring the fire under control, and it was not fully extinguished until Friday morning — some 40 hours after it started.
Crews prioritized apartments from which they had received emergency calls during the blaze but were unable to reach in the hours that the fire burned out of control, Derek Armstrong Chan, a deputy director of Hong Kong Fire Services, told reporters.
Twelve firefighters were among the 79 people injured in the blaze, and one firefighter was killed.
Even two days after the fire began, smoke continued to drift out of the charred skeletons of the buildings from the occasional flare-up.
More bodies may be found
While more bodies might be recovered, authorities said, crews have finished their search for anyone living trapped inside.
Authorities said Saturday they need to identify 44 more bodies out of the 128 recovered. About 150 people remain unaccounted for.
The dead included two Indonesian migrant workers, the Indonesian foreign ministry said Thursday. About 11 other migrants from the country who were working as domestic helpers in the apartment complex remain missing, Indonesian Consul General Yul Edison said Friday.
Near the site of the fire, Sara Yu held the hand of her 2-year-old son, Dominic, as they each placed a single white rose into a growing cluster of the flowers in a small children’s playground.
“I brought the kids here because I want them to understand that living in this world is something to be cherished,” she said, holding back tears.
Outside a building close to the scene of the fire where family members came to identify loved ones from photographs, people placed bouquets of white roses, lilies and carnations. “More than 128 innocent lives, what did they do wrong?” asked a sign placed among the flowers.
The city lowered flags to half staff in mourning, and Chief Executive John Lee, led a three-minute silence Saturday from the government headquarters with officials all dressed in black.
The fire was the deadliest in Hong Kong in decades. A 1996 fire in a commercial building in Kowloon killed 41 people. A warehouse fire in 1948 killed 176 people, according to the South China Morning Post.
