The deadly fire that engulfed several high-rise apartment towers in Hong Kong on Wednesday had strong similarities to the blaze that broke out at Grenfell Tower in London in 2017, and in both cases, those factors made it difficult for firefighters, an official at a fire engineering consulting firm said on Wednesday.
In the Grenfell Tower blaze, said Jonathan Barnett, managing director of Basic Expert, the consulting firm, a combustible element called cladding that ran up the outside of the 24-story building allowed the fire to jump from floor to floor. That fire killed 72 people, the British authorities said.
It was not clear what caused the Hong Kong fire, which killed dozens. Police were investigating whether building and scaffolding materials contributed to the rapid spread.
The towers were sheathed in bamboo scaffolding, which is commonly used in the territory to construct and repair buildings. Proponents say it is lighter and easier to transport in Hong Kong’s tight spaces, but the government has warned that it poses more of a fire risk.
The bamboo scaffolding and its sheathing — probably made of cloth or plastic — may have played the same role as the cladding, Mr. Barnett said in an interview.
They allow fire to jump across fire breaks from floor to floor, said Mr. Barnett, who testified before the U.S. Congress about the World Trade Center fire after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Those similarities created an almost unforgiving challenge for firefighters in both cases, he said.
Another element of difficulty is getting water to a fire scene so high up.
“The problem with fighting fires in high-rise buildings is that, how do you get water onto the fire?” Mr. Barnett said. “If the fire is above the reach of the hose stream from the trucks, what do you do? You have to fight the fire from inside.”
He said that puts the firefighters “at risk because they’re inside the building.” And while setting up their equipment, he added, “they’re in the way of people trying to escape the building.”
Even more challenging, said Albert Simeoni, a professor and department head in fire protection engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, outside Boston, is that the fire appears to have spread from one high-rise to another in what he calls a “domino effect.”
“When the fire reaches the top of the building, embers and burning debris are falling, reaching scaffolding on another building and spreading the fire again and again,” Mr. Simeoni said. With one hurdle on top of another, the firefighting operation can be disrupted at nearly every stage, he said. “It’s an absolute nightmare. You have an evolving situation, with a fire which is burning on the outside, debris falling, and firefighters can’t even stage their equipment well,” he added.
In videos of the Hong Kong blaze, fire truck ladders appear to reach only halfway up the burning buildings.
Search-and-rescue efforts are also unforgiving in this kind of environment, said Jack J. Murphy, a retired fire marshal and an author of the book “High-Rise Buildings: Understanding the Vertical Challenge.”
“The smoke movement is arduous,” Mr. Murphy said, for the firefighters as well as for any trapped residents, making rescue efforts even more difficult.
“This building was probably overwhelmed with smoke because the window are open or broken,” Mr. Murphy said of the Hong Kong towers.
James Glanz is a Times international and investigative reporter covering major disasters, conflict and deadly failures of technology.
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