Learn lessons from World Trade Centre fire to prevent deaths
- Blaze at city skyscraper under renovation led to 1,300 people being evacuated and just 13 injuries, but an investigation must ascertain why fire-prevention installations were switched off and who did it
Fire is the abiding fear of any crowded, high-rise city, where people work, live and socialise many floors above the ground. Options for safe exit are few and may narrow quickly.
We can be thankful for the dedication and professionalism of emergency services in ensuring serious casualties are kept to a minimum. Wednesday’s dramatic evacuation and rescue of 1,300 people from the flame- and smoke-filled 40-storey World Trade Centre in Causeway Bay is a case in point.
Only 13 people were injured, one critically, but the relatively fortunate ending is only part of the story. It could have been worse.
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Major fire breaks out at Hong Kong’s World Trade Centre in Causeway Bay, injuring 13
The circumstances of the outbreak, during lunch hour when diners packed restaurants, give cause for grave concern.
These included the auto-sprinkler system, manual fire alarms and fire detectors.
The department said the blaze started on the first and second floors of the building and involved an electrical meter room. Police said the fire spread to scaffolding covering the lower floors.
However the installations came to be turned off, and whatever explanation is put forward, it hardly seems to the ordinary person to be consistent with a duty of care to the public.
Who gave authority to the developer or contractor for these things to be turned off, or purported to have the authority, who asked for it and who did it are questions that an investigation into the incident must answer.
If anyone is found to have exceeded their authority, or acted with reckless disregard for public safety, they must be held accountable.
The first rule of fire safety is prevention. In that respect, too, there is another serious issue – how did fire-escape exits become filled with smoke, often a cause of many casualties.
The second rule is to have active emergency alerts and auto-sprinklers.
Asked whether fire protection measures should have been turned off, a senior fire department officer said only that the department had been informed about the move and would follow up to ensure the building was safe before allowing it to reopen.
There is a need for more far-reaching follow-up than that. Hong Kong has a reputation, fairly earned, for quickly developing collective public amnesia about unpleasant events and the lessons to be learned if they are not to be repeated, sometimes with loss of life.
Previous examples include fires that involved failure or neglect of preventive and safety measures. Until lessons are remembered and implemented, we can expected more preventable loss of life.
