At least 13 killed as fire engulfs Hong Kong apartments

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By Editor_1
People watch as flames burn bamboo scaffolding across multiple buildings at Wang Fuk Court housing estate, in Tai Po, Hong Kong, China, on Wednesday (November 26, 2025) - Tyrone Siu/Reuters

By Keith Bradsher and Joy Dong

HONG KONG — A deadly blaze tore through several high-rise apartment towers in Hong Kong on Wednesday (26), killing at least 13 people, including a firefighter, and injuring 15 others, sending smoke billowing across the city’s northern New Territories.

Hundreds of firefighters struggled to contain the inferno hours after it apparently started in one building at 2:50 p.m. local time. The flames spread across multiple high-rise towers, and several buildings were still ablaze late into the evening, more than six hours after it started.

A fire services department official said at a news briefing that 13 people had died and 15 had been injured. A government spokesperson had said earlier that three of the first five injured people treated at hospitals were in critical condition, according to a report from the city’s hospital authority.

Authorities raised their so-called No. 5 alarm for the fire, their highest rating for fire severity, for the first time in nearly two decades.

It was unclear how many others were still trapped in the buildings. Officials with the police and fire services said they had received numerous calls for help from residents, prompting authorities to escalate their response.

The Hong Kong Fire Services Department said that it had sent 760 rescuers to the site. John Lee, the chief executive of Hong Kong, said that he was activating the city’s Emergency Accident Monitoring and Support Centre.

The towers at Wang Fuk Court, a dense complex of about 2,000 apartments, were sheathed in bamboo scaffolding, which is widely used in Hong Kong to construct and repair buildings. The apartment towers are in Tai Po, a district in the northeastern corner of the New Territories.

Derek Armstrong Chan, deputy director of the fire service department, told reporters at the news briefing that the rescue effort was hindered by falling debris and scaffolding as well as high temperatures inside the buildings, making it difficult to access units where residents might be trapped. The ladders of two fire trucks appeared to reach only about halfway up the sides of the 32-storey towers.

Nozzles at the tops of the ladders sent jets of water into the middle floors of the burning buildings. But the tallest flames could be seen at the tops of the buildings, far higher than where the water was being sprayed.

Herman Yiu Kwan-ho, a former district councillor in Tai Po, said that he was in touch with a group of local residents, some of whom live in one of the buildings that caught fire. “More than 10 residents said their family members are still at their homes,” he said by phone.

One resident told him that she was inside her apartment when the fire was blazing outside, and only evacuated when a security guard knocked on her door to tell her to leave immediately, Yiu recounted.

The government said it opened temporary shelters at nearby community centres and a school to accommodate residents. Local media published photos of some older residents being helped away from the fire and gathering at the shelters, and described police officers going from door to door to urge residents to leave.

The apartment towers were built in the early 1980s. Bamboo scaffolding is often used for renovations to older buildings, which typically have a high number of senior residents who bought their apartments from the developer, moved in and never left.

The Hong Kong government announced plans last spring to begin phasing out the use of bamboo in scaffolding in favour of steel, which is widely used in mainland China. The government said at the time that steel scaffolding posed less of a risk of fires than bamboo, which is flammable.

Andy Yeung Yan-kin, Hong Kong’s director of fire services, said that a firefighter named Ho Wai-ho was among the dead. Another firefighter was being treated for heat exhaustion, Yeung said.

A century-old rail line that connects Hong Kong harbour to Shenzhen and the rest of mainland China, and which typically carries many thousands of passengers every day, runs within 300 yards of the complex. Authorities also closed parts of the nearby Tai Po Road, an important route for trucks going back and forth between Hong Kong and the mainland.

In October, the fire department attributed the rapid spread of a fire at an office building in Hong Kong’s central business district to scaffolding around the building. That fire injured four people and took more than four hours to put out.

-New York Times

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