Our letter to the editor
The accessibility of the Wang Fuk Court fire inquiry documents — as published in the South China Morning Post.
Publication
Published in the South China Morning Post letters column ↗ on 2026-08-19 under the heading “Fire inquiry documents should be more accessible”, in the edition “Letters | Hong Kong mustn't use the wrong index to gauge outdoor heat stress”. Our letter appeared in this edition of the SCMP letters column, published 19 Aug 2026 at 11:30am. The link above jumps straight to our letter within the edition.
The letter grew out of this site’s analysis: 243 documents, full-text search and the Terms-of-Reference framework are all referenced in the text below.
Wang Fuk Court fire - 1.9 million words, and the key questions are still hard to answer
Sir,
The Independent Committee on the Wang Fuk Court fire has published a large body of material - witness statements, hearing transcripts, expert reports and photographs. The site orders them by the sequence of the committee's work, not by the tasks outlined in its Terms of Reference. Journalists and the public seeking evidence on sprinkler failure or tender collusion must wade through page after page.
To test whether it could be made navigable, we used AI tools: a web crawler collected every document from the site, and large language models read, summarised and tagged each against the seven tasks in the Terms of Reference - including OCR for the 27 documents that arrived as scans with no readable text.
The results are striking: 243 documents, 6,377 pages, 1.9 million words, roughly 1,800 photographs and diagrams. Yet the material is unevenly distributed: supervision responsibilities appear in 195 documents, adequacy of laws in 77, and bid-rigging and collusion - what residents most want explained - in 99, against eight and eleven in a summary-level first pass. Nor is that all: reading the full text, we found evidence bearing on tender irregularities in documents that never use those words - a fire-service contractor that filed shutdown-renewal notices without ever visiting the estate, a renovation subcontract agreed orally with no written contract, and a contract attachment whose material-data folder was empty. A keyword search, or the committee's own menu, would never surface them. Every document is public, but the questions people ask are the ones the archive makes hardest to answer.
To help readers answer them, we have built a free bilingual site (https://wangfukcourtfirereport.simonsays.hk/) organised around the seven tasks. Each document has a page with a summary, key points, a table of contents and a link to the original PDF; an interactive map shows how the documents relate to each task, and full-text search spans all 243 documents. We urge the independent committee to adopt such tools in presenting its findings in a more accessible manner.
Wenyun Fu and Simon Wang, Kowloon Tong
The text below is the letter as submitted; the published version may differ slightly in wording and layout.
About the site the letter describes
- Map & Documents — every document, tagged against the seven Terms of Reference.
- Full-text search — across all 243 documents, with page-level snippets.
- ToR Perspectives — themed narratives that cite the documents behind each task.
- News & Coverage — how the media covered the fire, mapped to the record.
- About & Credits — methodology, image filtering and the OCR burden.
- LegCo engagement — the draft report to the Panel on Security, and how AI prepared it.
- Source code ↗ — open source, under
projects/FireReport.