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Huge fire burns many tall buildings killed dozens of people In Hong Kong was fueled highly flammable scaffolding materials, fire safety Experts said.
After this, at least 44 people died and about 280 people went missing. Fire tore many apart densely populated Apartment block at the Wang Fuk Court residential estate in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district on Wednesday.
the number of deaths is highest in fire In Hong Kong’s worst war since World War II, a fire in a commercial building in the Kowloon district in 1996 killed 41 people.
Winds caused flames to rise from seven buildings, with the fire not expected to be brought under control by the end of the day Thursday.
Experts said several factors contributed to the deadly blaze, including the dense development of the northern Tai Po district, where eight blocks of 2,000 apartments house more than 4,600 people.
According to fire safety engineers, the flammable nature of the bamboo and plastic scaffolding covering the buildings was a major factor.
Alex Webb, a fire protection engineer at Australia’s CSIRO, said, “The fire that spread across the Wang Phuc Court housing complex is likely to have been caused by a combination of factors including plastic scaffold encapsulation, plastic sheeting, polystyrene, bamboo structural scaffolding and any other flammable components.”
In the wake of the fire, Hong Kong authorities arrested three people, including two directors of a construction company and an engineering consultant, on suspicion of murder.
Police Superintendent Eileen Chung said, “We have reason to believe that the responsible parties of the company acted with gross negligence, which led to this accident and the fire spreading out of control, resulting in major damage.”
The incident immediately drew comparisons to the 2017 London Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people.
Experts called for strict monitoring of construction materials in such densely populated cities, including the use of fire-resistant scaffolding systems.
In the case of the Hong Kong fire, particularly the use of highly flammable bamboo scaffolding, the fire spread rapidly, he said.
Anwar Orabi, a fire protection engineering lecturer at the University of Queensland, said, “Several factors may have contributed to this, including scaffolding, which would have provided a ‘highway’ for the fire to advance vertically, and a hot nest for igniting embers from adjacent structures.”
“The bamboo scaffolding acts as a continuous external fuel path. Dry bridges have a high surface-area-to-mass ratio and, when wrapped with plastic mesh, create an airy ‘chimney’ that supports rapid flame spread,” said Ehsan Norouzinejad, an expert in smart flexible construction at the University of Western Sydney.
Engineers called for bamboo scaffolding to be replaced with metal scaffolding to prevent such disasters in the future.
Professor Guan Yeoh of the University of New South Wales said, “It is possible to reduce this fire risk, as metal scaffolding has long been used in many countries and can be easily adopted. By eliminating the use of bamboo scaffolding, the risk of widespread building damage and human deaths can be dramatically reduced.”
“It is time for change – to throw out old practices and adopt modern methods of fire safety and protection. Bamboo scaffolding is highly flammable, and strict building regulations should be implemented to ban its use,” said Dr Yeoh, an expert on fire-resistant infrastructure.