Hong Kong Fire Officers Testify as Wang Fuk Court Fire Inquiry Enters 17th Day
168 dead in city's deadliest blaze since 1947; committee examines safety conflicts and potential regulatory failures
Hızlı Bakış
- Four Hong Kong fire department officers testified Wednesday at an independent committee investigating the Wang Fuk Court fire that killed 168 people on November 26 last year.
- The inquiry heard evidence of conflicts between worker safety regulations requiring movable boards in emergency staircases—which replaced fireproof windows and allowed smoke to fill exits—and potential failures by the Labour Department to verify fire retardancy reports from contractor Prestige Construction and Engineering.
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The Wang Fuk Court fire is Hong Kong's deadliest since 1947, killing 168 people and destroying seven of eight buildings. The inquiry is examining whether worker safety regulations inadvertently created fire hazards and whether regulatory oversight failed to catch discrepancies in safety documentation.
Four officers from Hong Kong's fire department are testifying on Wednesday before an independent committee investigating the Wang Fuk Court fire, as hearings enter their 17th day. The conflagration, which broke out on November 26 last year amid a major renovation, claimed 168 lives, displaced about 5,000 residents and destroyed seven of the estate's eight buildings. It was the city's deadliest blaze since 1948. A potential conflict between ensuring workers' safety and minimising fire risks surfaced the previous day, as a senior occupational safety officer from the Labour Department said laws prohibiting workers from climbing on scaffolding led to movable boards being installed in the buildings' emergency staircases to facilitate their entry and exit. But the judge-led panel previously heard that such installations, which replaced fireproof windows, had caused smoke to fill the emergency staircases, preventing some residents from evacuating and complicating firefighting efforts. Another Labour Department officer said that days before the blaze, renovation contractor Prestige Construction and Engineering had sent the same scaffolding mesh fire retardancy report it submitted the year before to prove that nets it installed after September 2025 were safety compliant. But the department did not notice that the new report was dated July 2024, and focused only on the test results, the officer admitted before the committee. Preliminary investigations by authorities had shown that the scaffolding nets installed after September 2025 to replace those damaged by super typhoons earlier in the year were allegedly non-fire-retardant, leading to the rapid spread of the blaze. Follow our live coverage as the hearing continues.
Açık Sorular
- Who bears primary responsibility for the fire safety failures
- Whether criminal charges will be filed against the contractor
- What reforms to building safety regulations will result
