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Tai Po, Hong Kong: Grief-stricken and angry, Mrs Kwok wants answers as she stares in disbelief at the charred remains of her apartment complex where so many of her neighbours died.
She was at work and her son at daycare when an inferno tore through seven of the eight blocks at the Wang Fuk Court apartment complex in Hong Kong’s Tai Po neighbourhood on Wednesday.
It burned with such ferocity it took hundreds of fire crews two days to extinguish.
“I am very, very angry because the alarms didn’t go off,” says Kwok, 36, sobbing as she returned to the building site to pay her respects to the victims.
“Many of the older people would have been sleeping. The windows were sealed. They wouldn’t have heard anything and it was so far to climb down.”
Residents had complained about the renovations in the 40-year-old towers, and requested they be done one at a time, Kwok says, declining to give her full name.
“The management office rejected the demands. They asked the TV stations to report on this, but still the pressure didn’t work,” she says.
“It’s a major cause of why the fire happened.”
People place flowers near the site to mourn the victims of the deadly fire on Wednesday at Wang Fuk Court, a residential estate in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong’s New TerritoriesCredit: Chan Long Hei/AP
As forensic workers continued the grim process of retrieving bodies from the blackened towers, mourners arrived in their hundreds with white flowers to pay tribute to the victims of the city’s deadliest fire in decades.
Some whispered prayers, others stood in silence, staring at the burnt-out husks of the towers, tears streaming down their faces.
As Hong Kong entered its second official day of mourning, there is a curdling fury at how this catastrophe occurred, and with such grave cost to human life.
A mourner holding a flower near the site to mourn the victims of Hong Kong’s deadly apartment fires.Credit: AP
Handwritten notes placed among the growing tribute of flowers called for justice and accountability for those responsible, laying blame on a broken system.
“The problem exists in the system and God is watching,” one read.
The death toll stands at 128, but this figure has not been updated since Friday, and 44 of the dead are yet to be identified. A further 150 people remain unaccounted for. At least one more body was recovered from the towers on Sunday morning, the South China Morning Post reported.
The blaze has been compared to the Grenfell Tower fire in London – which killed 72 people in June 2017 – and has triggered similar accusations of lax safety standards and corruption.
For more than a year, bamboo scaffolding draped in green mesh had covered the facade of the Wang Fuk towers. The site had been inspected 16 times for safety, with authorities issuing six improvement notices.
People pray and lay flowers to mourn the victims of the deadly fire that killed at least 128 people.Credit: AP
The cause of the fire has not been confirmed, but Hong Kong authorities have arrested 11 people involved in the towers’ renovation, amid suspicion that the mesh and use of styrofoam in the renovation materials accelerated the blaze.
As well as Hong Kong locals, Indonesian and Filipino community members were among the mourners laying flowers at the site on Sunday, many of them live-in domestic workers on their first day off since the tragedy.
The death toll includes at least seven Indonesian workers and one Filipino, who were among the 119 Indonesians and 82 Filipinos that authorities believed lived and worked in the towers.
Yani, a 30-year-old Indonesian domestic worker, wept as she paid tribute to her friend who died in the blaze, leaving behind a five-year-old son in Indonesia. They came from the same village and had been friends since childhood.
“The entire community has broken hearts,” she says. “They came here to make money and they have lost their lives.”
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Candy Chan, who has lived in the Tai Po neighbourhood for 30 years and has friends who lost family members in the fires, said people were struggling to comprehend how this could have happened and wanted accountability.
“It’s a tragedy due to some human mistakes. I cannot imagine why it has happened in Hong Kong,” she says. “I really believe someone needs to be [held] responsible for this.”
Other messages carried a distinctly political tone, taking aim at the Hong Kong government’s decision to phase out traditional bamboo scaffolding – long an iconic feature of the city’s skyline – in favour of metal materials imported from mainland China.
“It’s the mesh that caused the fire, not the bamboo. The Hong Kong government is disregarding the life of human beings. They’re a power that murders people, just like the horrible CCP. Never use metal scaffolding,” one note read, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
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