HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong firefighters found dozens more bodies Friday during an intensive apartment-by-apartment search in a high-rise complex where a huge fire seven buildings were flooded and authorities arrested another eight people involved in the renovation of the towers. The death toll in one of the city’s deadliest fires rose to 128, with many still unreported.
First responders found that some fire alarms in the complex, which housed many elderly people, did not go off during the test, said Andy Yeung, the director of the Hong Kong Fire Department, although he did not say how many of them did not work and whether others did.
The fire spread quickly from one building to another bamboo scaffolding covered with mesh and foam panels apparently installed by a construction company caught fire.
Authorities arrested seven men and one woman on Friday, ranging in age from 40 to 63, including scaffolding subcontractors, directors of an engineering firm and project managers overseeing the renovation, the Independent Commission Against Corruption said in a statement.
On Friday, crews prioritized apartments from which they had received emergency calls during the fire but could not reach them in the hours the fire raged out of control, Derek Armstrong Chan, deputy director of the Hong Kong Fire Brigade, told reporters. It took the fire brigade about 24 hours to get the fire under control, but the fire was not completely extinguished until Friday morning.
Even two days after the fire started, occasional flare-ups continued to billow smoke from the charred skeletons of the buildings.
About 200 people are still missing, Security Minister Chris Tang told reporters. That includes 89 bodies that have not yet been identified. More bodies could be recovered, authorities said, although crews have completed the search for anyone trapped inside.More than 2,300 firefighters and medical personnel were involved in the operation, and 12 firefighters were among the 79 injured, Yeung said. One firefighter also died, he had said earlier.
Katy Lo, 70, a resident of Wang Fuk Court, was not at home when the fire broke out on Wednesday. About an hour later, she rushed back to find the fire had spread to her building.
“That’s my house… I still can’t really believe what happened,” Lo said Friday as she signed up for government assistance for affected households. “This all still feels like a bad dream.”
The apartment complex of eight 31-storey buildings in the Tai Po district, a suburb near Hong Kong’s border with mainland China, was built in the 1980s and had undergone major renovation. It had almost 2,000 apartments and about 4,800 inhabitants.
Three men – the directors and a technical advisor of a construction company – were arrested on Thursday on suspicion of manslaughter the police said company directors were suspected of gross negligence.
Police have not identified the company where the suspects worked, but documents on the homeowners association website showed Prestige Construction & Engineering Company was in charge of the renovation work. Police have seized boxes of documents from the company, where the phone rang unanswered on Thursday.
In addition to the new arrests on Friday, the anti-corruption agency also searched the offices of the suspects and seized relevant documents and bank details.
Authorities suspected that some materials on the exterior walls of the high-rise buildings did not meet fire resistance standards, allowing the fire to spread unusually quickly.
Police said they found highly flammable plastic foam panels attached to windows on each floor of the only unaffected tower. The panels were believed to have been installed by the construction company, but their purpose was not clear.
Preliminary investigations showed that the fire started on a lower scaffolding net of one of the buildings and then spread rapidly when the foam panels caught fire, said Tang, the safety secretary.
“The fire ignited the foam panels, causing the glass to shatter, leading to the rapid intensification of the fire and its spread to the interior spaces,” Tang said.
Authorities planned immediate inspections of residential complexes undergoing major renovations to ensure that scaffolding and building materials would meet safety standards.
The fire was the deadliest in Hong Kong in decades. A fire at a commercial building in Kowloon in 1996 killed 41 people. According to the South China Morning Post, a warehouse fire in 1948 killed 176 people.
Researcher Shihuan Chen from Beijing contributed to this report.
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