The Current - What to know about the deadly fire in Hong Kong

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

Firefighters in Hong Kong battled a deadly blaze for a second day today. At least 65 people are confirmed dead, but there may be hundreds still missing. The Wang Fuk Court public housing complex is home to nearly 5000 people. Three construction company employees have been arrested for manslaughter. We speak with James Griffiths, the Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail in Hong Kong.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. It is very difficult for us. We are trying our best, and we will not give up any chance to pick up to save life. That's the Deputy Director of Fire Services in Hong Kong. Firefighters in Hong Kong battled a deadly blaze for a second day today. At least 65 people are confirmed dead, but they're made. maybe hundreds still missing. The Wangfuk Public Housing Complex is home to nearly 5,000 people.

Seven of the eight buildings in that complex caught fire. Three construction company employees have been arrested for manslaughter. James Griffiths is the Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail. He's in Hong Kong. James, hello. Hi, good morning. It's nighttime there in Hong Kong right now, but what can you tell us about the state of the fires?

It's still burning. So we've been told by the authorities. Hong Kong leader John Lee spoke about an hour ago, and he said that the fire in most of the buildings is now under control. It's extinguished in several of them. And so firefighters have, after many, many hours of fighting the fire from outside, have now been able to enter several of the buildings and start, you know, quelling the fire on the lower floors and also most importantly, searching for survivors

and unfortunately for bodies inside. There have been very dramatic photos of when the fire was in full blaze. What did that look like? Yeah, I mean, it was horrific. These are 32-story buildings, and at the height of the fire, kind of yesterday evening, they looked essentially like massive candles and lighting up all the area around them, and they were visible from miles around. And even hours later, when the firefights has been working for several hours,

there was still a huge plume of smoke coming off the building about twice the height of the building itself. And, you know, this was just horrific, dramatic scenes with, you know, hundreds of people watching and, you know, a lot of residents and concerned relatives of people around watching the fire pretty helpless. As I said, this is a public housing complex. Some 5,000 people live there. Tell me a little bit more about these buildings, as you know it. Yeah, so Wongfoot Cor is one of a number of public housing estates in Daibor,

which is what's called a new town, which was developed in the 1970s and 80s in Hong Kong to kind of take population pressure away from the traditional population centers. And so you've a lot of public housing there, a lot of kind of mostly working and middle class families that live there. And so it is a very close in the community. And we actually saw that last night when I was on the ground. The area around Womford Court was actually, you know, packed with people, volunteers, people delivering food, water, clothes to the various shelters and, you know, just trying to help out in any way. These buildings have been under construction for a while. Tell me a little bit about the construction, in particular, the bamboo scaffolding that was wrapping many of these

buildings. Yeah, so renovations have been going on at One Foot Corp's since July last year. And you see there's a lot in Hong Kong that it's very common that Bamboo Scaffling is used, and particularly that development companies and construction companies like to wrap the entire building in Babby Scaffling so they can kind of do all of the work at once in one massive marathon job. And that was kind of a scale up even further at one foot court because we had eight buildings wrapped in bamboo scaffolding and kind of a mesh protective net. And it seems to be that net more so than the scaffolding that allowed the fire to spread so quickly. There have been a lot of questions today about whether it was actually a fire safe net that was used or if it was some other kind of cheaper

product that corners were cut. But you could see in the early videos in the early hours of the fire that this net was just burning incredibly quickly. And as the heat built up and as the kind of flames leapt off the buildings, it was spreading to the ones nearby, much, much faster than firefighters could deal with. You were reporting in the globe that there had been some concerns about some of the risks here, and perhaps not just the bamboo scaffolding, but other flammable materials that were being used in those renovations, right? Yeah, I mean, what's horrific that's come out in the last day or so is that it appears that residents had raised these risks a number of times, they'd made complaints, both about the kind of length of this renovation

project because they've been cut off from the sun for months and months, but also that, yeah, they were starting to see that there was trash and another kind of flammable materials building up in the nets because they weren't being cleared. The nets themselves, you know, people were concerned about the quality of them. There was a number of typhoons earlier this year and there were some residents were saying that after the typhoons, a lot of the nets were ripped away and they seemed to have been replaced with something else, which they suggested might have been a cheaper product. So people were raising the alarm about this, but unfortunately no action was taken.

And workers as well, who apparently were being careless with cigarettes. This is a kind of long-standing complaint that you often see workers on construction sites in Hong Kong smoking around scaffolding and nets like this or using welding torches and things like that. And, you know, I guess in the past, this has not resulted in disasters like this. So maybe people have become complacent. But, yeah, residents at the one court did say that they saw workers smoking and also, you know, said that some residents were smoking and maybe throwing cigarettes out of window. and that, you know, this just wasn't a safe environment for people to be kind of fat, like a days ago.

And so as I said in the introduction, three construction company executives have been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter. This happened within 24 hours of that fire starting. What do we know about that? Yeah, so police at a press very early this morning said that they had suspicions of gross negligence. They pointed to the materials that had been used. Not only this nesting, but also there was polystyrene blocks that have been used to block off some internal windows in the building. and there was suggestion that they too helped speed up the spread of the fire once it got inside. And so there was a raid on a company building this morning and also on several private residences associated with these men that have been arrested, who have not yet been named.

And police said they confiscated documents and other materials related to this project. And so we'll be waiting to see in coming days just what kind of alleged negligence they're able to find. Just finally, I mean, when I was watching the images of this yesterday morning as the fire was spreading, The first thing that came to mind were the images that we saw in London of the Grenfell Tower fire. Seventy-two people were killed in that fire. Again, public housing complex concerns around some of the material that was being used in that construction that caught on fire.

Did you see the comparison there? Yes, absolutely. And, you know, I remember the Grenfell fire, you know, instantly and seeing this was very reminiscent of that. you know, even at a much greater scale, because this was seven buildings on fire. And it's raised a lot of concerns because, you know, like we said, the bamboo scaffolding and kind of this kind of netting that wraps buildings is very common.

I'm looking out of my window from my house at the moment, and I can see a building across the street from me that is wrapped in almost identical materials to what we saw in Wongford Court. So this is raising a lot of concerns that, you know, potentially this is a more danger wasting to happen. the authorities said this afternoon that they're going to inspect every renovation project that's currently ongoing in the city.

So we probably see a lot of this stuff start to come down. But yeah, it was kind of tragic and there have obviously been people involved in the Grenfell Tower response that have kind of said that, look, lessons maybe weren't learned from that disaster, but hopefully will be from this one. James, thank you

very much for this. Thank you. James Griffiths. Is the Asia correspondent for the Globe and Mail? He was in Hong Kong. This has been the current podcast. You can hear our show Monday to Friday on CBC Radio 1 at 8.30 a.m at all time zones. You can also listen online at cbc.ca.ca slash the current or on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.