Analysis: Hong Kong Fire Exposed Fatal Gap in High-Rise Safety Doctrine

The fire that turned a Hong Kong housing estate into a vertical funeral pyre for at least 55 people has revealed a terrifying new anatomy of urban disaster: a blaze that attacked from the outside in, rendering decades of high-rise firefighting doctrine and building safety design tragically obsolete.

The inferno at Wang Fuk Court, which raged for more than 27 hours and required the city’s largest-ever firefighting response, was not a typical residential fire that starts in a single apartment. An analysis of the blaze’s behavior shows it was a rare and vicious external assault, fueled by a combustible mix of bamboo scaffolding and protective netting that created a “chimney effect” up the building’s facade, trapping residents inside a structure that was never designed to withstand such a threat.