The record is public.
The answers are hard to find.
The Independent Committee has published everything online — 243 documents, 6,377 pages, 1.9 million words. But the material is filed by the sequence of the committee's work, not by the seven questions in its Terms of Reference. We rebuilt the record around those questions — and drafted the report to the Panel on Security.
Why the original site is hard to use
The committee's own menu — About the Committee, Timetable for Hearings, Key Documents, Transcripts — mirrors how it worked, not what the public needs to know. Anyone chasing evidence on sprinkler failure or tender collusion must wade through page after page, with no overview of how the documents relate to the seven Terms of Reference. And a keyword search cannot bridge the gap: the strongest evidence on tender irregularities sits in documents that never use those words.
How the record is filed
- About the Committee
- Timetable for Hearings
- Key Documents
- Transcripts — by hearing date
- Documents — by filing sequence
What people actually ask
- Why did the fire alarms fail?
- Who verified the netting and the boards?
- Was the renovation tender rigged?
- Who was supposed to supervise — and didn't?
- Are the existing laws and penalties adequate?
An alternative is feasible — and already built
A web crawler collected every document; PDFs were converted to text with all 8,785 embedded images extracted; the 27 documents that arrived only as scans were read by OCR; and large language models read, summarised and tagged every document against the seven Terms-of-Reference tasks. The result is a free, bilingual, open-source companion to the committee's site.
Every one of the 243 documents on a page of its own — summary, key points, table of contents, link to the original PDF — and an interactive map of how they relate to each task.
Search across all 1.9 million words, with page-level snippets that jump straight to the passage in the original document.
Seven themed narratives — one per Terms-of-Reference task — citing the documents behind every point.
How the media covered the fire, mapped against the documentary record — including what the coverage missed.
What the deeper reading reveals
Findings from reading all 243 documents in full — most of them invisible to a keyword search of the committee's own site.
Supervision responsibilities appear in 195 documents; the adequacy of laws in 77. Bid-rigging and collusion — what residents most want explained — appear in 99 documents in the full text, against 8 and 11 in a summary-level first pass.
A fire-service contractor filed 85 shutdown-renewal notices without ever visiting the estate; a renovation subcontract was agreed orally, with no written contract; a contract attachment's material-data folder was empty. None of these documents says "bid-rigging" — a keyword search would never surface them.
The independent checking unit gave advance notice of inspections; an FSD inspection five weeks before the fire missed the deactivated alarms; a registered inspector was described in evidence as a rubber stamp. The same pattern recurs across regulators.
Renovation-contractor fraud and fire-safety-contractor behaviour are two distinct failure chains. They meet in the fire systems that were switched off — alarms deactivated in seven of the eight blocks, fire-service water tanks emptied.
The draft report to the Panel on Security
Modelled on the 2021 minibus-safety letter to the Panel on Transport
(LC Paper No. CB(4)1353/20-21(01)): a short letter, our published SCMP letter as the appendix,
and a sources table linking every factual claim. Addressed to
panel_s@legco.gov.hk.
Brief the Panel. Invite the Security Bureau and the Fire Services Department to present the Committee's findings and recommendations as soon as the report is published — and table the report to the Panel.
Fix the shutdown regime. A contractor filed 85 shutdown-renewal notices without any site visit. Ask how shutdowns and restorations of fire service installations will in future be verified by physical inspection.
Contractor accountability. Ask what mechanisms can suspend or debar contractors implicated in the inquiry pending prosecutions — two fire-service contractors linked to the tragedy were still taking new contracts in August 2026.
A public implementation timetable. For the Committee's recommendations, including legislative amendments under its third term of reference on the adequacy of existing laws and penalties — with progress reported back to the Panel.
Present the record by ToR. So that members and the public can trace each recommendation to the underlying evidence — the accessibility concern in our published letter.
Timing
The Committee's report is due by the end of October 2026 (extension granted on 18 August 2026). The letter is timed to land in the week the report is published, so the Panel can put the briefing on its next agenda.
Read the full draft with the sources table ↗ · Source code on GitHub ↗ · Our published SCMP letter →
How AI prepared this report
The draft was prepared by an AI agent in a single working session under Dr Simon Wang's direction, instructed through the public GitHub issue. The full session log is attached to the issue; the steps below summarise it.
Read the GitHub issue and the instruction; identified the sample paper to follow — the 2021 minibus-safety letter to the Panel on Transport.
Downloaded the sample paper PDF, extracted its text and learned its structure — letter, appendix, sign-off.
Read the repository README, the published SCMP letter and its sixteen draft versions, and the press record.
Queried the project's own analysis data — fire facts, themes, ToR coverage counts, latest developments — rather than re-reading 6,377 pages.
Checked every key fact against the committee's site and news sources; rendered the JavaScript-only LegCo panel page in a headless browser to verify the panel's email address and the CB(2) paper series.
Built a twelve-row sources table linking every factual claim in the letter to its authoritative source.
Modelled the letter on the sample; kept legal liabilities outside the asks, per the Committee's own scope note; left co-signatories as a placeholder for the editors' list.
Posted the full text to GitHub issue #1 and committed the file to both repositories — public by design, as the issue itself notes.
What the human decided
- The task, the audience and the sample to follow
- The editor contacts for co-signatories
- Review, signature and the decision to submit
What the AI did
- Gathered and verified the evidence, source by source
- Drafted the letter, the five asks and the appendix
- Built the sources table and the submission notes
- Published to the issue and committed to both repos
For LegCo members: the briefing this record deserves
168 people died at Wang Fuk Court. The evidence of what failed — and what must change — is already public. We ask the Panel on Security to follow up the Committee's findings with the Security Bureau, and to make the implementation of its recommendations public and trackable.