What building experts say about Hong Kong firepublished at 04:26 GMT
04:26 GMT
Investigations into the cause of the disaster are still ongoing.
But experts have weighed in on what they think could explain the devastation caused by the fire at Wang Fuk Court. Scaffolding and mesh netting had been set up around the apartment blocks for renovation works.
Guan Yeoh, professor of engineering at the University of New South Wales, and fire safety engineering expert, told the BBC that placing flammable materials around the building was like “waiting for a disaster to happen”.
The bamboo scaffolding poses “some amount of hazard”, so do other construction materials that had been brought up to the buildings, said Charles Jennings, associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an expert on fire safety in skyscrapers.
The severity of the fire could have also been made worse by the fact that the apartment blocks were very tall and clustered close together, he said.
He told the BBC that “any fire service is not adequately equipped to cope with a full height fire on the exterior of a high-rise building”.