‘We can’t get any answers’: grief and anger in Hong Kong after deadly high-rise fire

Original article by Helen Davidson and Shanshan Kao in Hong Kong

For almost 48 hours, Mr Lau had been calling his cousin. On Wednesday afternoon Lau was at his home nearby, when he saw smoke from Mei Lan’s building. Mei Lan, her husband, and their children live in the Wang Fuk Court high-rise apartment complex in northern Hong Kong. Shortly after lunchtime on Wednesday, a fire started in one of its eight high-rise towers, and quickly spread to six others. It burned for more than two days, killing at least 128 people – a number certain to rise.

The inferno has been compared to London’s Grenfell Tower disaster. Not just for the scale, but for the now rampant questions about negligent safety standards and corruption, amid revelations that the construction site had been inspected 16 times for safety concerns and allegedly had a history of violations.

Late on Friday, Mei Lan still was not answering Lau’s calls. The phone just rang and rang.

“I’m worried she might have fainted from the heat and can’t hear [the phone],” Lau told the Guardian. “People have died now; of course I hope she can make it out, but there is no contact. I’m worried, of course, I feel awful. The whole family, five or six people, is missing.”

Officially, Mei Lan and her family were among the 200 or so people unaccounted for, including 89 bodies that could not be visually identified. Lau was accompanied by two friends, and the three elderly men were keeping each other upbeat and optimistic, fielding calls from other friends and relatives.

It was hard to stay hopeful. The small children’s playground where Lau spoke to the Guardian is adjacent to a community centre through which families of victims walked to identify the dead. Once firefighters could finally access the upper floors, there was a steady stream of people leaving the building, often in floods of tears.

Outside a local school, repurposed as an evacuation shelter, another man sobbed. His parents lived in the towers and were missing.

“I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I just need to know … I don’t expect them to still be alive, I only want you to tell me they’re gone so I can stop missing them. Let me know they’re in heaven,” he cried. “But I don’t know anything.”

He asked: “What is John Lee, Hong Kong’s chief executive, doing? All he does is walk around and hold press conferences. What about us? We can’t get any answer to our questions.”

Much of the city’s grief is racked with anger. Since the crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, the government has made “national security” its overriding priority. There is a sense among some that while the government has been chasing down any whisper of potential dissent, a building of almost 5,000 people, which authorities knew was not safe, burned down.

At the volunteer donation site in Tai Po, scores of young people ran various stalls, held cardboard information signs and offered support using collective action skills not seen at this scale since the 2019 protests.

An online petition even listed “four demands”, echoing the protests’ “five demands” for democratic rights, but calling for guaranteed care of victims and accountability for officials in any corrupt activity.

It appeared to be making the government nervous. After dark on Friday, a squad of armed police officers walked laps of the donation site, and government workers took over from volunteers at the shelters.

Interactive

Authorities were quick to act after the fire, arresting three employees of the construction company on Thursday, and launching an independent commission against corruption. On Friday, the anti-corruption watchdog said it had arrested eight people.

But the ferocity of the fire, and how many people were unable to escape it, has raised significant questions and accusations of complacency, negligence, and corruption in the city’s construction sector.

Hong Kong is famously a city of densely packed apartments that stretch into the sky, cramming millions into an area that can be crossed from end to end in just a couple of hours.

The bamboo scaffolding and mesh that covered Wang Fuk Court is a ubiquitous sight in the city. Hong Kong’s security secretary said on Friday that preliminary investigations had identified the unauthorised and highly flammable styrofoam boards discovered in windows on every level of every tower as the primary cause of the fire’s intensity, and that the mesh was up to standard.

A man who gave his name as Mr Au lost both his parents to the fire, which also put his brother in intensive care. He said the windows of their home were all sealed with flammable styrofoam-like material.

“There are too many problems. Repairs are so expensive, and what kind of people did they hire?” said Au. “The biggest issue is the lack of fire safety awareness. The fire alarm didn’t ring, otherwise my parents could have evacuated.”

This particular renovation was already controversial before the fire.

Work began in July 2024, with a reported price tag of HK$330m (£33.5m). The contract, awarded to Prestige Construction & Engineering Co, drew accusations that decision makers had chosen the most expensive proposal, despite the costs being shared by residents, who include social housing recipients.

Prestige Construction & Engineering Co could not be reached for comment. Local media reported the physical office was closed when they visited during business hours after the fire.

In September, residents lodged concerns with authorities about the renovations, “including the scaffolding netting”, the Hong Kong labour department told the Guardian. The department said they had told residents the netting was to catch falling debris, and that current safety regulations “do not cover flame retardant standards” for such material. Given the construction did not involve open flames such as welders, the risk was low, they said.

That response prompted further complaints, so they clarified that the netting had been inspected, and “met approval standards”.

However, the department also said inspectors had visited the site 16 times after the complaints, and issued multiple written warnings about the need for better fire safety measures, including as recently as last week.

“Whatever the government does is useless, says Au. “It’s already over. I just hope it won’t happen again. Arresting a few people to take responsibility can’t help us. Proper supervision should have been in place from the very beginning.”

Additional reporting by Lillian Yang