Hong Kong's aging towers face urgent questions after city's deadliest blaze in decades

By Ning Pan, Bang Xiao / ABC

When the photogenic silhouette of old residential towers turned into a wall of flames, many Hongkongers felt a shock of recognition - Wang Fuk Court was not unusual.

The fire, Hong Kong's deadliest in nearly 70 years with a death toll of at least 128 and still 200 missing, did not erupt in a forgotten industrial warehouse or a remote hillside village.

It tore through the kind of high-rise homes that shape daily life for millions - old towers built at speed during the city's boom years, and carrying their risks ever since.

For decades, Hong Kong's skyline - its glass towers and steel spires - has overshadowed a quieter truth below it: the city is aging.

And as the scale of the disaster grew, so did the question that has unsettled the city ever since: could this happen again?

The city of towers

Wang Fuk Court was completed in the early 1980s, part of a vast public-housing push that spread identical towers across the territory.

The layout was efficient: narrow corridors, compact flats and a tower-block design repeated from estate to estate.

Those buildings were constructed under the standards of their time. Modern fire-safety requirements - refuge floors, upgraded smoke-extraction systems, stricter material controls - came later.

As a result, many older towers carry vulnerabilities that were never addressed through comprehensive retrofitting.

That legacy now stretches across the whole city. Hong Kong has roughly 44,000 private buildings, and more than 9600 are over 50 years old.

By the end of the decade, the figure could reach 14,000.

Government papers show thousands of these buildings have already been issued orders to undergo mandatory inspections, revealing widespread deterioration.

Age alone does not make a building unsafe. But old design, old materials and incomplete maintenance create conditions that can compound quickly in a fire - as Tai Po showed.

How the blaze became so deadly

Investigators are still determining how the flames moved through Wang Fuk Court, but early findings offer a troubling picture.

Renovation scaffolding wrapped in mesh and tarpaulin burned almost instantly, carrying flames up the exterior of the tower. Styrofoam packed around window frames intensified the spread and created dense smoke.

Inside, the towers' vertical shafts channelled heat upward, a classic "chimney effect" that can turn a small fire into a rapidly climbing one, according to authorities on Thursday.

Dr Jiang Liming, an assistant professor specialising in building environment and fire safety from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said disasters of this scale usually arise when several unfavourable factors occur at once.

"Scaffolding mesh, window-frame foam, on-site fire-safety management - each may contribute," he explains, "but the critical turning point is how and when exterior flames penetrate indoors.

"It is the moment when an external fire begins to ignite multiple interior points that transforms a frightening facade fire into an extreme, life-threatening event," he said.

Strong winds pushed the blaze from one block to another. Fire crews struggled to reach upper floors fast enough, limited by the height of the buildings and the intensity of the heat.

None of these factors are unique to Tai Po. They mirror conditions present in many older towers undergoing repairs or long-delayed maintenance.

Dr Xinyan Huang, deputy director of Hong Kong's Research Centre for Smart Urban Resilience and Firefighting, told the ABC that despite Hong Kong's reputation for rigorous safety requirements, no regulation can guarantee absolute protection.

"Hong Kong's building fire safety regulations are among the strictest in the world and are rigorously enforced, resulting in very few fire-related casualties in the city," Dr Huang said.

"During construction, aging buildings using combustible materials - especially in dry and windy conditions - can easily become pathways for rapid fire spread."

Where maintenance slows

What the Tai Po fire laid bare was not a single failure, but a system strained by time and complexity.

Dr Huang says the underlying regulatory system is sound, but implementation often falters inside aging blocks.

"In older buildings, the effectiveness of implementing these systems often varies significantly due to differences in management capabilities, owner participation levels, and resource constraints," he said.

He said that some older buildings lack professional managers, leaving basic risks unattended for long periods.

"In theory, inspections should be conducted monthly or even weekly, but actual implementation varies significantly."

Thousands of Hong Kong's older buildings lack active owners' corporations, making basic upkeep difficult.

Where corporations do exist, decisions often stall because residents cannot afford major repairs or cannot agree on how to carry them out.

Many occupants are elderly. Others are landlords living elsewhere. Shared responsibility becomes no responsibility.

Redevelopment faces its own obstacles. Buildings can have hundreds of individual owners. Even after recent reforms, compulsory sales still require significant consensus. Meanwhile, the number of buildings entering "old age" far exceeds the pace of renewal.

The Urban Renewal Authority has warned for years that deterioration is outpacing improvement. Tai Po has made the consequences painfully visible.

A turning point

Fire behaviour in high-rise buildings is a challenge everywhere, but density makes it harder here.

Towers stand close together. Bamboo scaffolding is common. Escape routes rely on stairwells that must remain clear and functional.

Some experts argue the issue is not whether older buildings have escape routes on paper - most do - but whether those routes work in practice: whether fire doors close, alarms activate, and smoke can be controlled long enough for residents to flee.

At the same time, the outdated infrastructure of older towers creates broader risks.

Hong Kong's buildings account for 90 per cent of the city's electricity use and 60 per cent of its carbon emissions. Modernising the built environment is now a safety and climate priority.

Some developers have begun retrofitting their commercial buildings to meet international green standards. But residential blocks - especially older ones - remain far behind.

Many estates simply lack the resources, governance structures or incentives to undertake large-scale upgrades.

Urban planners and green-building scholars have argued for years that Hong Kong needs a long-term plan to retrofit its buildings by 2050.

The proposal goes beyond fire safety: better ventilation, stronger electrics, modern water systems, greener materials and upgraded facades.

Such a plan would require coordinated financing, legislative reform and the support of Hong Kong's financial sector - a recognition that renewal is not just a housing problem, but an urban one.

The question now is whether the Tai Po fire will accelerate that shift.

Dr Huang emphasised Hong Kong could reduce risks by tightening controls on combustible temporary materials and strengthening on-site precautions during renovation.

"First, the use of combustible cladding materials on exterior walls during construction must be strictly prohibited," he said.

"Do not blindly trust fire safety regulations, as they only guarantee the minimum level of fire safety and cannot ensure absolute safety.

"When residents discover fire hazards, they should promptly address them rather than using compliance with fire regulations as an excuse for inaction."

This story was first published by the ABC.