Staff were prioritizing apartments from which they received more than two dozen calls for assistance during a fire Hong Kong Fire Service deputy director Derek Armstrong Chan told reporters on Friday morning, but he was unable to be reached.
“Our fire fighting operation is almost complete,” he said.
The fire started on Wednesday afternoon in one of the eight towers of the Wang Phuc Court complex, and quickly spread from one tower to another. bamboo scaffolding The fire that broke out in the mesh installed for repair continued to burn until seven buildings were engulfed by it.
It took more than 1,000 firefighters about 24 hours to bring the five-alarm blaze under control, and nearly two days later, smoke continued to billow from the charred skeletons of buildings with occasional flare-ups.
The final search of the buildings is expected to be completed on Friday, at which point authorities have said they will officially end the rescue phase of their operation at the complex in Tai Po district, a northern suburb near Hong Kong’s border with mainland China.
It was unclear how many people could possibly be inside the buildings, which contained about 2,000 apartments and about 4,800 residents. Hong Kong leader John Lee said Thursday morning that authorities had not been able to contact 279 residents.
“We will try to force entry into all units in the seven blocks concerned to ensure there are no other possible casualties,” Chan said.
He said updated figures on the number of missing people could not be calculated until search and rescue operations were completed.
The apartments from which a total of 25 unanswered rescue calls were received, which are being prioritized, were mainly on higher floors, where the firefighting operation was done last, he said.
More than 70 people, including 11 firefighters, were injured in the fire, and about 900 people were housed in temporary shelters.
Chan said most of the deaths occurred in the first two buildings that caught fire.
apartment complex Many old people were given shelter. It was built in the 1980s and is undergoing massive renovation. Hong Kong’s anti-corruption agency said on Thursday it was investigating possible corruption related to the renovation project.
Three directors of a construction company and an engineering consultant have been arrested on suspicion of murder police said The company leaders were suspected of gross negligence.
Police have not identified the company where the suspects worked, but The Associated Press confirmed that Prestige Construction and Engineering Co. was in charge of renovations at the tower complex. Police have seized boxes of documents from the company where the phone rang on Thursday.
Officials suspect that some materials on the exterior walls of the high-rise buildings did not meet fire resistance standards, allowing the fire to spread unusually quickly.
Police also said they found plastic foam panels – which are highly flammable – attached to windows on each floor near the elevator lobby of an unaffected tower. The panels were believed to have been installed by the construction company but the purpose was unclear.
Authorities plan urgent inspections of housing estates undergoing major renovation to ensure that scaffolding and construction materials meet safety standards.
The fire was the worst fire in Hong Kong in decades. In 1996, a fire at a commercial building in Kowloon killed 41 people.
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Researcher Shihuan Chen in Beijing contributed to this report.
This story changed the name of the fire service officer to Derek Armstrong Chan, not Wong Wing.
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