How a housing safety disaster was averted, four decades before the Tai Po fire tragedy

According to the Wang Fuk Court fire inquiry, residents of the doomed estate made no fewer than 180 efforts to ward off the danger presented by careless building work. They sent complaints or inquiries to at least five government departments.

This was not a success. We must note in particular the Labour Department’s achievement. During 15 site visits, their inspectors concluded that there was no evidence of workers smoking and complaints were “not justified.” Whoops.

See also: Takeaways from the independent probe into the Tai Po fire

There is an interesting contrast here with a rather similar story from long ago. The present Kwai Fong Estate is a perfectly satisfactory piece of work constructed between 1987 and 2002. But there was a previous Kwai Fong Estate.

This was built between 1972 and 1975 at a time when the supervision of building work was marred by rampant corruption in the relevant department. By 1982, it became clear that, as a result, the estate featured a lot of questionable concrete.

In the ensuing three years, residents became increasingly concerned, particularly about Block 5, and there were petitions, pleas to the district board and legislators, and press conferences. The housing authorities, meanwhile, maintained that there was nothing to worry about, an assurance somewhat diluted when they decided to evacuate the top two floors of Block 5.

Eventually, one of the more enterprising local NGOs colluded with a local newspaper to organise a clandestine inspection of Block 5 by an engineer, armed with a gadget for testing the quality of concrete. This produced some readings at the fried tofu end of the scale, which a newspaper gleefully splashed.

The Housing Authority then collapsed in a heap, which was embarrassing, but not as bad as having one of its buildings collapse in a heap. It announced an immediate evacuation of Block 5, and plans to demolish the whole estate. It also published the results of safety assessments of its entire stock, and plans to replace all the older buildings in it.

This left everyone feeling good about themselves and is perhaps a good example of how public pressure can goad government departments into doing things they know they ought to do but have been putting off.

The enterprising NGO, the Society for Community Organisation, is still with us, as is the newspaper, the Standard, though the investigative team which did this sort of story was disbanded in 1987.

But of course this kind of thing could not be repeated now. Nous avons, as Molière put it, changé tout cela. Nowadays, raising a petition or holding a press conference could prompt a knock at the door. Meanwhile, your district councillor and lawmaker have been carefully selected for their willingness to admire the government, while investigative journalism is discouraged and public records are increasingly put off limits to protect the privacy of miscreants

This is a pity. Let us look at it this way. One of the great unsung improvements to aviation safety was the abandonment of the system in which the captain was the undisputed sovereign of his cockpit and the co-pilot was just expected to push buttons and pull levers as instructed.

The replacement arrangement is that the two pilots decide among themselves who will be the “pilot flying” and the “pilot monitoring,” with the clear understanding that – regardless of who is most senior – the pilot monitoring is expected to watch for and object to questionable moves.

In moments of crisis, the senior pilot may decide to take over the “pilot flying” role, or they may not, because the pilot monitoring has the time to deal with other matters, like diagnosing the problem and contacting the ground.

The Hong Kong government has now switched back to the “captain in charge” system and input from the underlings is no longer encouraged, or even tolerated. This system may have many advantages but it has a cost, which might be payable in blood.

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Tim Hamlett came to Hong Kong in 1980 to work for the Hong Kong Standard and has contributed to, or worked for, most of Hong Kong's English-language media outlets, notably as the editor of the Standard's award-winning investigative team, as a columnist in the SCMP and as a presenter of RTHK's Mediawatch. In 1988 he became a full-time journalism teacher. Since officially retiring nine years ago, he has concentrated on music, dance, blogging and a very time-consuming dog.