Embers of a false safety by Mary Long

Last week’s tragedy at Wang Fuk Court in Hong Kong, where at least 151 people lost their lives and dozens more remain missing, has been officially met with arrests. Thirteen people, including construction-company executives and consultants, now face manslaughter charges.

But while those arrests offer a measure of accountability, they also expose a deeper rot: the corruption and systemic neglect embedded in the city’s infrastructure oversight and a government too indifferent to property and human safety when profit and paperwork come first.

Residents had been raising the alarm for over a year. They warned that the renovation covering the towers was reckless, bamboo scaffolding wrapped in cheap nylon netting, foam-panel cladding, sealed windows, and non-functional fire alarms.

Authorities ruled the risk “relatively low.” Inspections were carried out. Notices were issued. But enforcement was absent. Contractors cut corners. Inspectors looked away. And the city carried on. Until the netting caught fire and flames raced upward like ill wind through dry brush. Within hours, seven towers were enveloped. Stairwells, corridors, entire flats: blackened husks. Bodies found on rooftops. Others turned to ash.

This was not a freak accident. It was a catastrophe written long before that first spark, carved in the ledgers of profit and malice, smoothed over by bureaucracy.

Yes, it matters that construction bosses and engineers face criminal charges. They are complicit. In a morally honest city, they would have been stopped the moment substandard materials were spotted.

But what about the layers above them? The regulators who failed to act. The political milieu that requires housing quotas and schedules more than safety. The legal and institutional inertia that turns certifications and inspections into cosmetic theatre.

By focusing on a handful of culprits, we risk mistaking the symptom for the disease. The arrests may quiet the outrage but they do nothing to change the machinery that made this inferno possible.

Scrimping on fire-safe scaffolding mesh, punching out foam-board window panels, sealing alarms behind walls: these are not accidents. They are business decisions, calculated attempts to maximize profit at the expense of human lives.

And in a city where real estate is king, where density is prized, and where political expedience trumps public safety, it is unsurprising these cost-cutting measures go unchecked. But it is unforgivable.

This tragedy should never have happened. It was not “bad luck” it was bad governance. A collective, institutional lethargy. A façade of compliance papered over by greed and inefficiency.

If Hong Kong’s leadership believes that locking up a handful of contractors will end this chapter, they misunderstand the crisis. The people who died and the survivors whose lives were shattered, did not perish because of a few bad actors. They died because the entire system failed them.

What is needed now is a sweeping, transparent inquiry not only into who cut corners, but into why and how those corners ever existed in the first place. An overhaul of construction safety laws, fire-code enforcement, tenant protections and the political will to enforce them.

Otherwise, when the next renovation deal comes along, the same illegality will return. The same corners will be cut. And the next fire won’t be a tragedy. It’ll be a guarantee.

In the smouldering remains of Wang Fuk Court, the city witnessed more than a disaster. It glimpsed a truth: profit and power in Hong Kong have too often trumped human life. Holding a few individuals responsible is not enough. If the city does not confront its rot, in its infrastructure, its oversight, its values, then it will remain a place where the next fire is not a possibility, but a certainty.