Wang Fuk Court
Fire Inquiry

The fire and the Committee

On 26 November 2025, a fire broke out at Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po — a Home Ownership Scheme estate of eight blocks, built in 1983. All eight blocks were undergoing external renovation, wrapped in bamboo scaffolding and protective netting. The fire burned for about 43 hours, killing 168 people (including one firefighter) and injuring 79. At its peak, the Fire Services Department deployed 174 fire engines, 47 ambulances and 989 firefighters — the largest operation in the department's history.

The Chief Executive announced an Independent Committee on 2 December 2025, formally established it on 12 December, and tasked it with completing its work within nine months. The Committee is chaired by a High Court judge. Its Terms of Reference cover four areas: (1) the fire's causes, spread and casualties, including fire-service installations and renovation works; (2) systemic issues — connected interests, collusion and bid-rigging in the maintenance works; (3) the adequacy of existing laws and penalties; and (4) recommendations. The Committee held 27 days of public hearings, heard 73 factual witnesses and 7 expert witnesses, and received nearly one million documents totalling over 1 TB of data.

The government's site — and its weaknesses

The Committee has published its material on its official website — 243 documents comprising investigation reports, expert reports, hearing transcripts, witness statements, closing addresses, replies from contractors and legal submissions. This is a remarkable act of transparency. But the material is arranged by the sequence of the Committee's work, not by the questions it was asked to answer. The site does have a search bar — powered by the generic GovHK search engine — but it indexes PDF filenames and cached text only, returns results as a flat list of links, and cannot filter by topic, show which page a term appears on, or group results by Terms of Reference. A search for "collusion" returns 30 links to PDFs; the user must still open each one and search within it manually. The 243 documents total 6,377 pages and roughly 1.9 million words — far more than any journalist or member of the public can read in full.

The Committee's findings — in brief

The Committee's own closing submissions, drawing on the full evidential record, identify a chain of systemic failures: a main contractor (宏業) that deliberately purchased non-fire-retardant scaffolding netting and used flammable foam boards to cover windows, while providing suspected forged test certificates; a registered fire-service contractor (中華發展) that filed shutdown notices without ever visiting the site, acting as a "rubber stamp"; a supervision consultant (鴻毅) that performed no effective oversight; and a property management company (置邦) that allowed unlicensed personnel to operate fire installations. The fire-service shutdown regime — designed to let the Fire Services Department monitor safety — was systematically abused. The Competition Commission and ICAC evidence shows that bid-rigging and collusion in the building maintenance industry are systemic and long-standing. The Committee's full closing submissions run to 627 pages; the key findings are summarised on each document page and in the ToR perspectives on this site.

What this site can do that the original cannot

The Committee's final report, when published, will present its conclusions. The government's document site gives you 243 PDFs in filing order. Neither lets you ask a question and get every relevant passage across every document. This site does. Here are specific questions a journalist or resident can answer here that they cannot answer from the final report alone or by browsing the government site:

• "Which documents contain evidence on bid-rigging?" — The government site lists documents by date; the final report cites selected ones. Here, 99 documents are tagged and listed, each with a summary of its relevance to collusion — including documents that never use the word "collusion" but describe oral subcontracts, rubber-stamp approvals, and work allocation controlled by the main contractor.
• "What did each contractor actually say?" — The final report summarises; the government site gives you a 7-page PDF. Here, each contractor's reply is on its own page with a summary, key points, and a direct link to the exact passage — e.g., On Cheong's admission of an oral subcontract with no written contract, or Tin Hung's statement that all work was directed by the main contractor.
• "Search across all 243 documents for a name, a company, or a phrase — and see which page it's on." — The government site's search returns a flat list of PDF links; you must open each PDF and search within it yourself. Here, full-text search spans all 1.9 million words and returns every document with the matching term, with a snippet of the surrounding text — so you can see the context without opening a single PDF. A search for "collusion" returns 35 documents here, each with a snippet; on the government site it returns 30 PDF links with no context.
• "How do the documents relate to each other?" — The government site offers no cross-referencing. Here, an interactive map shows which documents cite each other, which cover the same theme, and how evidence accumulates across witness statements, expert reports and closing addresses.
• "Which documents are scanned images that cannot be searched?" — The government site publishes 46 documents (347 pages) as scanned images with no machine-readable text. Here, every page has been OCR'd and made searchable — and the About page documents this gap and condemns the practice.
• "Give me a one-page summary of each document before I decide whether to read it." — The government site gives you a filename. Here, every document has a summary, key points, themes, parties mentioned, and related documents — so you can assess relevance in 30 seconds instead of downloading and skimming a 100-page PDF.

This site is an independent, non-commercial project. It is not a publication of the Committee and makes no findings of its own; the original documents remain authoritative. It is bilingual (English and Traditional Chinese).

Our letter on the accessibility of the Wang Fuk Court fire inquiry documents was published in the South China Morning Post letters column on 19 August 2026 (SCMP Letters ↗). It makes the case that the committee's 243 documents — 6,377 pages, 1.9 million words — are arranged by the sequence of the committee's work, not by the questions it was asked to answer, and that the evidence people most want (on collusion and bid-rigging) is buried in documents a keyword search never surfaces. This site is our working answer: 243 documents tagged by Terms of Reference, full-text search, and page-level citations. The source code is open source on GitHub ↗ (FireReport under projects/FireReport).