Director of Fire Services Andy Yeung Yan-kin has rebutted a wave of online criticism over the handling of the Wang Fuk Court inferno, which has now killed at least 128 people, including a 37-year-old firefighter, while confirming that the building’s fire alarms never sounded and enforcement action will follow.
Addressing reporters on Friday, Yeung explained why helicopters, ultra-high aerial platforms, and drones were not deployed.
Helicopter water drops, he said, would only have soaked the outside of the towers, while the powerful downdraft would have fanned oxygen into the blaze and made it spread faster.
The city’s 100-metre ladder trucks require a 10-metre-wide road to extend their stabilisers, but the estate’s emergency access lanes are only six metres across, rendering them unusable.
Drones, even those used experimentally across the border in Guangdong, simply cannot carry enough water through hoses large enough to tackle a fire raging across multiple flats simultaneously.
Yeung confirmed that specialist teams inspected all eight blocks on Thursday and found the fire-alarm systems completely inoperative, paving the way for prosecution of the responsible contractor.
A cross-departmental task force, led by a senior New Territories South officer and including police, Buildings Department, Electrical and Mechanical Services Department, Housing Department, Labour Department, and Government Laboratory experts, has already begun a two-pronged investigation into both the cause of the blaze and the rapid spread that turned it into a catastrophe, as well as the environmental factors that led to such devastating loss of life.
