{"id":157075,"date":"2025-11-28T08:03:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T08:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/157075\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T08:03:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T08:03:07","slug":"hong-kong-fire-live-death-toll-soars-to-128-after-tower-block-blaze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/157075\/","title":{"rendered":"Hong Kong fire live: Death toll soars to 128 after tower block blaze"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What building experts say about Hong Kong firepublished at 04:26 GMT<\/p>\n<p>04:26 GMT<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Investigations into the cause of the disaster are still ongoing.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">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 &#8220;waiting for a disaster to happen&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The bamboo scaffolding poses &#8220;some amount of hazard&#8221;, 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He told the BBC that &#8220;any fire service is not adequately equipped to cope with a full height fire on the exterior of a high-rise building&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What building experts say about Hong Kong firepublished at 04:26 GMT 04:26 GMT Investigations into the cause of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157076,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[114,184,85,46],"class_list":["post-157075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}