The high death toll resulting from last November’s Tai Po blaze was “totally avoidable,” experts have concluded. A public inquiry has heard that more than half of the 168 victims died from smoke inhalation, and that fire alarms had been turned off due to human error.
The independent committee investigating the city’s deadliest fire in decades resumed its hearings on Monday following a week-long break, as two experts testified on the causes of the blaze and the factors that led to the loss of life at the Wang Fuk Court housing estate.
Following the blaze, the government set up an inter-departmental investigative task force. Separately, the independent committee appointed its own experts to probe the causes and circumstances that led to the tragedy.
Victor Dawes, lead counsel for the committee, said on Monday that the two teams of experts worked independently from each other but arrived at “largely similar” conclusions, according to local media reports.
Citing the experts’ reports, Dawes said that 91 victims died from inhaling hot smoke. During the fire, toxic gases quickly spread through the interior of the buildings as fireproof windows were replaced with wooden boards in emergency staircases, he said.
The renovation contractor used the wooden boards as entry-and-exit points for workers to access bamboo scaffolding, the inquiry previously heard. Wang Fuk Court was undergoing major repair works at the time of the fire.
Dawes said that, during fire simulation tests conducted by the government’s investigative team in Sichuan, the temperature at the emergency staircases reached more than 600 degrees Celsius when fireproof windows were replaced.
With fireproof windows in place, temperatures fell to 56 degrees Celsius during tests, Dawes said.
‘Zero’ time to evacuate
The experts also identified foam boards used to shield windows from falling debris and disabled fire alarms as factors that hindered residents’ escape, as many were not alerted to the blaze in time.
“The time allowed for evacuation was practically zero,” Dawes said.
Lam Kin-kwan, a deputy chief fire officer and the deputy leader of the government’s investigative task force, told the inquiry that the fire spread to the roof of Wang Cheong House about 15 minutes after it first broke out in a first-floor light well at around 2.43 pm.
When firefighters arrived at the scene at 2.56 pm, the fire was already spreading upward “exponentially,” he said, adding that a large amount of combustible construction materials stored on the roof had contributed to the rapid spread of the fire.
Lee Wing-man, chief chemist at the government laboratory’s forensic science division, said that most samples from the temporary protective nets stored at Wang Fuk Court at the time of the blaze failed fire-retardancy tests.
She also said that the government investigative team ascertained smoking as the most likely cause of the fire after ruling out other possibilities.
The hearings will resume on Wednesday. Government-appointed expert Richard Yuen, an architectural engineering professor at the City University of Hong Kong, is expected to testify.
