In the afternoon of Wednesday, November 26, it was windy in the part of Hong Kong where eight 31-story apartment towers called Wang Fuk Court were undergoing renovations. As has been the custom for hundreds of years, exterior scaffolding made of bamboo was erected around the towers. To prevent damage to the single-pane windows of the complex, workers had covered the windows with foam-plastic sheets. Nylon safety nets surrounded the scaffolding. What could go wrong?
The world found out when an unknown cause started a fire in the lower level of one of the scaffolds. The flames quickly spread from high winds to the flammable plastic sheets over the windows. Burning debris and flames spread from tower to tower until seven of the eight towers were engulfed. About 40% of the residents were over 65, and the fire alarms in many of the buildings were later found to be out of order.
For the next day or so, the fire defeated efforts of thousands of firefighters to control it. As of this writing, the confirmed death toll stands at 146, with dozens more missing. About 4,600 people lived in the complex, so many got out alive. But many others, probably including most of those who needed mobility assistance to escape, didn't make it.
News reports are calling this tragedy a "man-made disaster," and I couldn't agree more. Authorities have arrested several officials of the construction company in charge of the renovations, Prestige Construction and Engineering Company, and have halted the firm's work on all other projects in order to conduct safety inspections.
Whoever made the choice of protective window panels may have chosen low cost over safety. In any event, that choice directly contributed to the fire perhaps more than anything else, although final conclusions will have to await a thorough investigation. The use of nylon for safety netting and bamboo for scaffolding are also questionable, although China has a centuries-old tradition of bamboo scaffolding that has only recently come into question as metal scaffolding gradually supplants it. Photos of the scene after the disaster seem to indicate that the scaffolding largely stayed in place, but was charred to the point of being structurally unsound.
As soon as I learned of this fire, I thought of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London. In that disaster, a refrigerator caught fire in a lower apartment and the flames spread to flammable exterior insulating sheathing that had been installed in an upgrade some years before. The fire propagated behind the sheathing and was difficult to extinguish, and before it was all over, 72 people died and many more were injured. Again, negligent planning and a failure to take account of the flammability of exterior sheathing was at fault, just as it appears to be in the Wang Fuk Court fire.
Engineering ethics requires imagination of a particularly informed type: imagination bolstered by in-depth technical knowledge. Engineers sometimes have a reputation for being dour pessimists who always jump to the worst-case scenario of a given situation. But in the case of the Hong Kong fire, engineers were not pessimistic enough. Nobody apparently imagined what would happen if one of the plastic window-sheathing panels caught fire, especially if it was on a lower floor of a building that happened to be upwind of most of the others on a blustery day.
It's possible that workers were instructed not to smoke or to engage in operations that might lead to a fire. That's all very well, but not everybody follows instructions. And even the best-intentioned workers can be using equipment that shorts out or otherwise becomes a source of ignition. Good safety practitioners imagine that something statistically unlikely will nevertheless go wrong, and then draw conclusions from that premise.
Judging from the number of residents listed and the casualty list, it's possible that about 5% of the listed residents died in the fire. That means that 95% escaped either with no injuries or non-life-threatening ones, while however losing most of their worldly possessions. No one I know would like to go through an unplanned experience that will strip you of your things and lead to a one-in-twenty chance of death. So while fire escapes and other built-in safety features allowed most residents to escape the flames, over a hundred didn't.
Major renovation projects are routinely inspected by civil authorities, and I can't imagine that this project was an exception. If a construction firm neglects to take due safety precautions, it is the civil authority's responsibility to step in and halt work if necessary in order for safety hazards to be addressed. This obviously wasn't done.
I don't know the nature of safety inspection services in Hong Kong, but among those to be held accountable should be whoever permitted the work to proceed. Such officials can be subject to corruption pressures, and until a tragedy like this occurs, no light is shed on the fact that corners are being cut by paying off inspectors. I have no reason to believe that this was the case here, but it is certainly an avenue worth investigating.
Disasters like this one can have the silver lining of making future safety regulations and inspections much more rigorous. As the investigations proceed and the chain of causation is revealed, Hong Kong engineers, construction firms, and officials can all learn valuable lessons that are driven home by the horrible example of what can go wrong if safety measures are neglected. My sympathy is with those who lost loved ones in the fire. And my hope is that nobody anywhere in the world puts flammable sheathing on high-rises ever again.
Sources: I referred to a BBC report at https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxe9r7wjgro, a report from the news outlet livemint.com at https://www.livemint.com/news/world/hong-kong-apartment-fire-death-toll-climbs-to-146-probe-reveals-fire-code-violations-11764496767266.html, and the Wikipedia article "Grenfell Tower fire.
