Hong Kong housing minister resigns after Wang Fuk Court fire inquiry finds regulators enabled the disaster

HONG KONG

Hong Kong's housing secretary resigned and the city's chief executive apologized on Thursday after an independent committee concluded that the government's own regulators enabled the conditions behind the deadliest fire in Hong Kong in decades.

Housing Secretary Winnie Ho submitted her resignation on Wednesday, Chief Executive John Lee said at a news conference. Lee told reporters that Ho "should bear political responsibility" for the disaster, although the inquiry found no personal wrongdoing by her. He and seven other senior officials bowed in apology at the opening of the briefing.

The fire broke out last November at Wang Fuk Court, a seven-building apartment complex in Tai Po, a suburban district in the New Territories. It killed 168 people and displaced thousands. The blocks were wrapped in netting, canvas and foam board for a maintenance program at the time, and many former residents have spent nearly a year waiting for the government to account for what happened.

What the committee concluded

The independent committee found that the Housing Bureau's independent checking unit failed in its duty to supervise the maintenance work. It also identified shortcomings in how the Buildings Department, the Fire Services Department and the Labor Department oversaw fire hazards at the complex.

Lee said a three-month investigation will now examine the four agencies to determine whether staff were derelict in their duties.

At the center of the report is a finding about method rather than a single mistake. The regulators, the committee said, depended on the honesty of the parties they were regulating.

"In each case, the regulator's reliance on the good faith of the regulated parties left obvious fire hazards uninvestigated," the report said.

The committee also criticized the independent checking unit for routinely notifying consultants and contractors in advance of site inspections, and for failing to properly investigate repeated complaints about the foam board and the fire-retardant quality of the scaffolding netting.

How the fire started and why it spread

The report said the evidence pointed to a lighted cigarette as the cause. The fire began on the flat roof between two apartments on the first floor of Wang Cheong House. The committee heard substantial evidence that construction workers smoked on site, including on the scaffolding, and investigators recovered cigarette butts and partly burned material, including cardboard boxes, from the roof.

Foam board, non-fire-retardant scaffolding netting and canvas contributed to how quickly the fire spread, the report found.

Most of the deaths were caused by smoke inhalation rather than burns, and the inquiry traced a chain of decisions that routed smoke into the routes residents needed to escape. Staircase windows were replaced with movable aluminum composite panels or wooden boards for the convenience of workers. Opaque foam board covering apartment windows blocked residents' view of conditions outside and delayed evacuation. The fire alarm system had been shut down.

The contractors

The committee said Will Power Architects, the consultant on the maintenance project, and Prestige Construction & Engineering, the main contractor, had cut corners.

"There is no doubt that they are the main culprits responsible for the occurrence of the inferno and the high fatalities in the tragic incident," the report said.

The evidence also described a wider layer of registered contractors and building professionals who carried out no substantive work and were paid to lend their names to statutory forms, effectively rubber-stamping documents that regulators treated as proof the work had been checked.

The private contractors and consultants deceived the regulators, the committee found. But, it said, "deception succeeded because the regulators' own practices enabled it."

The criminal case is separate

The committee's work is separate from a criminal prosecution in which seven people and the two companies, Will Power and Prestige, have been charged with offenses including manslaughter and conspiracy to defraud.

Authorities allege the two companies and some of the defendants conspired to defraud the owners of the estate by concealing previous litigation records of the company that was later awarded the renovation contract, a job worth more than HK$300 million, or about US$38 million.

Measures proposed

Officials proposed a series of measures in response to the report, including criminalizing bid rigging in building maintenance. The proposal addresses a mechanism the inquiry described directly: owners' committees awarding large contracts in a market where tender manipulation carried no criminal exposure.

For property operators outside Hong Kong, the findings describe a failure sequence that is not unique to the city. Combustible material added to the exterior of an occupied building during repair work, escape routes altered for crew convenience, a fire alarm taken offline while people remained inside, and an inspection regime that accepts the contractor's paperwork as evidence.

USPA Nationwide Security maintains a reference guide to hot-work fire watch requirements for construction sites, and to emergency fire watch coverage where a building's protection systems are impaired during renovation.