Tai Po fire probe: ‘regulatory vacuum’ revealed in polyfoam board oversight

This story has been made freely available as a public service to our readers. Please consider supporting SCMP’s journalism by subscribing.Four officers from Hong Kong’s Fire Department are testifying on Wednesday before an independent committee investigating the Wang Fuk Court Fire, as hearings enter their 17th day.The conflagration, which broke out on November 26 last year amid a major renovation, claimed 168 lives, displaced about 5,000 residents and destroyed seven of the estate’s eight buildings. It was the city’s deadliest blaze since 1948.A potential conflict between ensuring workers’ safety and minimising fire risks surfaced the previous day, as a senior occupational safety officer from the Labour Department said laws prohibiting workers from climbing on scaffolding led to movable boards being installed in the buildings’ emergency staircases to facilitate their entry and exit.But the judge-led panel previously heard that such installations, which replaced fireproof windows, had caused smoke to fill the emergency staircases, preventing some residents from evacuating and complicating firefighting efforts.Another Labour Department officer said that days before the blaze, renovation contractor Prestige Construction and Engineering had sent the same scaffolding mesh fire retardancy report it submitted the year before to prove that nets it installed after September 2025 were safety compliant.But the department did not notice that the new report was dated July 2024, and focused only on the test results, the officer admitted before the committee.Preliminary investigations by authorities had shown that the scaffolding nets installed after September 2025 to replace those damaged by super typhoons earlier in the year were allegedly non-fire-retardant, leading to the rapid spread of the blaze.Follow our live coverage as the hearing continues. coverage: