Building owners in Hong Kong have 175,000 fire safety demands outstanding, with composite buildings like New Lucky House the worst offenders
A staggering 175,000 fire safety directions issued by the government remain ignored or outstanding as at the end of 2023, representing 45% of the total number of fire safety directions ever issued and showing earlier figures given by Buildings Department (BD) to be misleading.
BD last week said it had issued a total of 80,670 fire safety directions, of which 26,434 were complied with. But newly-found figures from FSD show a total of 391,350 demands made by joint BD/FSD operations, nearly five times as many as BD originally claimed.
The actual number of demands outstanding or ignored is 174,820, three times BD’s original figures. BD has not commented on the discrepancy.
The 391,350 demands made by FSD/BD joint operations covered both commercial buildings and composite commercial/residential buildings under the Fire Safety Ordinance.
For commercial buildings, FSD reports a compliance rate of around 96% in total, but for composite buildings the rate is just 55%, with 170,773 fire safety demands ignored since composite buildings fell under the Fire Safety Ordinance in July 2007.
There’s no public data on the age of outstanding fire safety demands, but FSD records show that only around 117,000 demands have been made in the last five years. That would place around 274,000 demands as at least five years old.
BD says the government generally gives building owners a year to carry out fire safety demands and says it adopts a “flexible and pragmatic approach in handling individual cases”.
The issue came to light following a tragic fire at New Lucky House in Jordan last Wednesday morning, where five people died. Victims died just metres from safety, with residents reporting blocked stairwells and broken fire equipment. Broken fire doors caused smoke to flood into escape stairwells, causing four of the five deaths. Another victim died after falling from height trying to escape.
New Lucky House had been subject to fire improvement orders for 16 years, with no progress made and no prosecutions for inaction over that time.
Development Secretary Bernadette Linn yesterday told LegCo that building owners were not taking the government seriously and that the “government’s enforcement efforts have fallen short”.
She pointed to failures in falling concrete from ageing buildings ignoring safety orders as well as neglected fire safety orders as in New Lucky House. Few have been brought to justice: and Linn said the average fine for those prosecuted was just HK$2,500.