Death toll rises to 128 in Hong Kong residential fire; 8 more arrested over towers’ renovation

Hong Kong’s worst fire in nearly 80 years has claimed at least 128 lives and left hundreds more unaccounted for.

Hong Kong firefighters found dozens more bodies Friday in an intensive apartment-by-apartment search of a high-rise complex where a massive fire engulfed seven buildings, and authorities arrested another 8 people involved in the towers’ renovation. The death toll in one of the city’s deadliest blazes rose to 128, and many remain unaccounted for.

First responders found that some fire alarms in the complex, which housed many older people, did not sound when tested, said Andy Yeung, the director of Hong Kong Fire Services, though he did not say how many were not working or if others were.

The blaze jumped rapidly from one building to the next as foam panels and bamboo scaffolding covered in netting apparently installed by a construction company caught fire.

• IN PICTURES: Deadly fire rips through high-rise buildings in Hong Kong

Authorities on Friday arrested seven men and one woman, ranging in age from 40 to 63, including scaffolding subcontractors, directors of an engineering consultant company and project managers supervising 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 blaze but were unable to reach in the hours that the fire burned out of control, Derek Armstrong Chan, a deputy director of Hong Kong Fire Services, told reporters. It took firefighters a day to bring the fire under control, and it was not fully extinguished until Friday morning -- some 40 hours after it started.

Even two days after the fire began, smoke continued to drift out of the charred skeletons of the buildings from the occasional flare-up.

More bodies may be found

Some 200 people remain unaccounted for, Secretary for Security Chris Tang told reporters. That includes 89 bodies that have not yet been identified. Yet more bodies might be recovered, authorities said, though crews have finished a search for anyone living trapped inside.

More than 2,300 firefighters and medical personnel were involved in the operation, and 12 firefighters were among the 79 people injured, Yeung said. One firefighter was also killed, he had said previously.

Katy Lo, 70, a resident of Wang Fuk Court, was not home when the fire started Wednesday. She rushed back roughly an hour later to see that the blaze had spread to her building.

“That’s my home. I still can’t really believe what happened,” Lo said on Friday as she registered for government assistance for affected households. “This all still feels like a bad dream.”

The dead included two Indonesian migrant workers, the Indonesian foreign ministry said Thursday. About 11 other migrants from the country who were working as domestic helpers in the apartment complex remained missing, Indonesian Consul General Yul Edison said.

The government said all official flags in the city will be lowered to half staff in mourning from Saturday to Monday. The city’s leader, John Lee, will lead a three-minute silence Saturday from the government headquarters.

The apartment complex of eight, 31-story buildings in Tai Po district, a suburb near Hong Kong’s border with mainland China, was built in the 1980s and had been undergoing a major renovation. It had almost 2,000 apartments and some 4,800 residents.

Highly flammable foam panels blamed

Three men -- the directors and an engineering consultant of a construction company -- were arrested Thursday on suspicion of manslaughter, and police said company leaders were suspected of gross negligence.

Police have not identified the company where the suspects worked, but documents posted to the homeowners association’s website showed that the Prestige Construction & Engineering Company was in charge of renovations. Police have seized boxes of documents from the company, where phones rang unanswered Thursday.

In addition to the new arrests Friday, the anti-corruption agency also searched the suspects’ offices and seized relevant documents and bank records.

Police said they found highly flammable plastic foam panels attached to the windows on each floor of the one unaffected tower. The panels were believed to have been installed by the construction company but the purpose was not clear.

Preliminary investigations showed the fire started on a lower-level scaffolding net of one of the buildings, and then spread rapidly as the foam panels caught fire, said Tang, the secretary for security.

“The blaze ignited the foam panels, causing the glass to shatter and leading to a swift intensification of the fire and its spread into the interior spaces,” Tang said.

Authorities suspected some materials on the exterior walls of the high-rise buildings did not meet fire resistance standards, allowing the unusually fast spread of the fire.

Authorities planned immediate inspections of housing complexes undergoing major renovations to ensure scaffolding and construction materials meet safety standards.

The fire was the deadliest in Hong Kong in decades. A 1996 fire in a commercial building in Kowloon killed 41 people. A warehouse fire in 1948 killed 176 people, according to the South China Morning Post.

David Rising And Chan Ho-him, The Associated Press

Researcher Shihuan Chen in Beijing contributed to this report.