Fire breaks out at Hong Kong’s Shek Kwu Chau waste-to-energy plant

A fire broke out on Monday at Hong Kong’s waste-to-energy incinerator on an artificial island off Shek Kwu Chau.

The blaze started at 12.43pm at the Integrated Waste Management Facilities Phase I and was upgraded to a No 3 alarm at 1.24pm, the Fire Services Department said. A No 3 alarm is the third of five levels, with five the most severe. Higher alarm levels trigger the deployment of more resources to fight a fire.

Firefighters deployed two water jets and two breathing apparatus teams to battle the flames. No casualties have been reported so far.

The facility, officially named I·PARK1, is the city’s first large-scale waste-to-energy plant. Built on a roughly 12-hectare artificial island off Shek Kwu Chau in the city’s southwestern waters, it is designed to handle up to 3,000 tonnes of waste a day.

Costing HK$31.3 billion (US$4 billion) and taking more than seven years to build, the facility began operations in December last year as part of the government’s plan to phase out reliance on landfills by 2035.