Hong Kong: A devastating analysis of the Wang Fuk Court inferno in Hong Kong has revealed that flames raced upward at a speed far beyond what residents could outrun, a building safety expert said on Thursday. The blaze, which engulfed an entire 32-story tower in minutes, advanced so rapidly that it overwhelmed the building’s normal evacuation timelines.
Xinyan Huang, an associate professor in the Department of Building Environment and Energy Engineering at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said the fire’s vertical spread was shockingly fast even by high-rise standards.
“The evacuation time for a 32-story building is naturally slow,” Huang explained. “People typically need at least 10 to 20 minutes to get from upper floors to safety. But in this case, the fire climbed from bottom to top in about five minutes.”
Such a mismatch between human movement and fire behaviour, he said, left residents at a severe and unfair disadvantage.
Huang noted that the central issue investigators must examine is not merely how the blaze started, but why it accelerated at such an extraordinary speed.
“Modern buildings are designed to withstand accidental fires inside apartments,” he said in an interview with CNN’s Rosemary Church. “But they are not designed for a fire that races along the exterior, then re-enters the building. That scenario simply isn’t accounted for in today’s fire codes.”
According to Huang, the blaze’s explosive upward spread was likely fueled by the bamboo scaffolding that wrapped the tower for renovation work. Bamboo, he stressed, is inherently flammable especially during Hong Kong’s dry season and its long, vertical poles can act like a ladder for flames.
“This is similar to what happens with flammable façade cladding,” he added. “Once it ignites, firefighters have almost no time to block the spread.”
Huang drew comparisons to the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where a 24-story residential building coated with combustible exterior cladding went up in a catastrophic fire that killed 72 people. The parallels, he said, highlight the urgent need to rethink global high-rise fire safety standards.
As investigations continue, experts warn that the Wang Fuk Court tragedy may become a defining case study in how outdated construction practices and external materials can turn ordinary fires into deadly vertical infernos.