A massive fire that ripped through multiple apartment buildings in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district, on Wednesday, has left at least 44 people and about 300 more missing, CNN has reported.
Fire fighters did a yeoman’s job trying to quench the inferno, but the fire quickly flared across multiple high-rise buildings, a housing scheme, and still blazed for 16 hours.
Though investigation is ongoing, it is widely believed that the bamboo scaffoldings and the protective blanket used by contractors during construction may have provided the ready fuel to power the blaze.
Already, three suspects are cooling their heels in police custody, telling detectives all they know about the fire, the worst in 60 years in Hong Kong.
Commenting on the fire, Prime Minister Prime Anthony Albanese said:
“My heart goes out to the people who have lost their lives, and the people who are searching and concerned about loved ones, this has been a human tragedy and the hearts of all Australians today will be thinking of the people of Hong Kong who are going through a very tough day.”
ABC reported that the horror of the high-rises becoming huge pillars of fire was nothing compared to the situation inside them.
The report quoted David Downey, a veteran firefighter of four decades and the chairman of the National Fire Protection Agency in the United States as saying that the combustible materials decking the exterior make for extreme conditions for firefighters inside and anyone trapped in their apartments.
“It’s a concrete structure, so it’s virtually an oven inside,” he told ABC NewsRadio.
“The higher you go, the hotter it gets, and it appears that the fire not only extended up the outside, but penetrated into the building.
“I absolutely have concerns about the possibility of collapse … the concrete can only withhold so much heat.”
Downey said there were echoes of other overseas disasters, and yet another wake-up call around safety standards.
“We’ve seen these exterior fires before,” he said.
“The tragedy in London and the Grenfell Towers, it was an exterior fire that travelled rapidly up the outside of a building.
“The hotel in Dubai, the New Year’s Eve fire in 2015, again, a combustible exterior.
“Having this combustible exterior lends us to massive fire growth, and we’re seeing this firsthand in this tragedy.”
