Urban Nightmare: Lessons from Hong Kong’s Deadliest Fire in 77 Years

What happens in Hong Kong doesn’t stay in Hong Kong. If it’s bad, it sends a shudder through the urbanscape of the world. It could happen anywhere. Well, not exactly. Hong Kong is a vertical city, constricted horizontally, packed with people with nowhere to live but heavenwards. The fire that engulfed the block of subsidised public flats at Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po had killed 55 at the time of writing, with 270-plus still missing. Hong Kong’s deadliest in 77 years. So far.

Three construction company executives have been arrested for manslaughter and dredged up residents’ complaints about shoddy renovation—the flats are old, built in the 1980s—and inflammable materials quickly took over the internet. Bamboo scaffolding, too, is believed to be a major cause of Wednesday’s (November 26) fire spreading so rapidly.

In 1962, a similar fire had killed 44 and made hundreds destitute. In 1948, a fire had killed 176, which till this morning was the deadliest in 63 years. In 1996, the Garley Building fire killed 41. Hong Kong has always been a lesson in the hair-trigger dangers of dense urban housing and workspaces. Almost every major Indian city, for instance, is vulnerable to such conflagration, especially where the construction is old. And yet, a tragedy like this usually changes little, until the next time.

As of Thursday morning, officials said the fire was under control in four of the housing complex’s seven buildings but others continued to burn. According to police, the charges against the arrested construction executives involve the use of inflammable materials like mesh and plastic sheets. Experts say, built in the 1980s, the windows were not double-paned. The fire quickly broke down the single-pane windows and spread inside. But questions are yet to be answered as to how exactly the blaze started and who, if anybody, is responsible.

Residents have revealed that they didn’t hear a fire alarm even after the blaze had started. Flames could be seen even a day after the fire broke out on Wednesday, with smoke plumes still rising. Attention has been drawn by fire safety experts to the traditional bamboo scaffolding still used in Hong Kong, as in much of Indian construction to date, which connected the building at Wang Fuk Court and helped spread the fire rapidly.

A fire incident of this magnitude, with the death likely to rise, calls into question not merely the technicalities of construction processes, plans and materials but also the larger oversight of urban governance, a large part of which should concern housing. In packed vertical spaces like Hong Kong, it takes very little to trigger a city-wide disaster. And it’s not a coincidence that older parts of town and certainly older buildings or blocks are the most vulnerable to incidents of largescale fire damage.