By Keith Bradsher and Joy Dong | Keith Bradsher reported from Beijing and Joy Dong from Hong Kong
Firefighters tried to douse the blaze at an apartment complex in the city’s northern Tai Po district, which killed at least four people.
A deadly blaze tore through several high-rise apartment towers in Hong Kong on Wednesday, killing at least four and injuring several others as bright flames engulfed the buildings and plumes of dense smoke billowed across the city’s northern New Territories.
A government spokeswoman said that four people had been declared dead at a hospital. Citing an initial report from the city’s hospital authority, she added that another five people had been hospitalized, three of them in critical condition.
It was unclear how many others were still trapped in the buildings. A duty officer with the city’s police force, also reached by phone, said the police had received multiple calls for help from residents.
The towers at Wang Fuk Court, a dense complex of about 2,000 apartments, were sheathed in bamboo scaffolding, which is widely used in Hong Kong to construct and repair buildings. The apartment towers are in Tai Po, a district in the northeastern corner of the New Territories.
The government said it opened temporary shelters at nearby community centers and a school to accommodate residents who needed help or who had evacuated their homes. Local media published photos of older residents being helped away from the fire and gathering at shelters, and described police officers knocking on doors to urge residents to leave..
The apartment buildings were built in the early 1980s. Bamboo scaffolding is also often used for renovations to older buildings. It is common for older buildings in the city to have a high number of senior residents who bought their apartments from the developer, moved in and never left.
The Hong Kong government announced plans last spring to begin phasing out the use of bamboo in scaffolding in favor of steel, which is widely used in mainland China. The government said at the time that steel scaffolding posed less of a risk of fires than bamboo, which is flammable.
Andy Yeung Yan-kin, Hong Kong’s director of fire services, said that a firefighter was among the dead. Another firefighter was being treated for heat exhaustion, Mr. Yeung said.
A century-old rail line that connects Hong Kong harbor to Shenzhen and the rest of mainland China, and which typically carries many thousands of passengers every day, runs within 300 yards of the complex. The authorities also closed parts of the nearby Tai Po Road, an important route for trucks going back and forth between Hong Kong and the mainland.
In October, the fire department attributed the rapid spread of a fire at an office building in Hong Kong’s central business district to scaffolding around the building. That fire injured four people and took more than four hours to put out.
Source: nytimes.com