Firefighters receive 179 reports of people trapped in lifts after sudden voltage dip

Hong Kong firefighters have received over 200 reports of people trapped in lifts and falsely triggered fire alarms after a sudden drop in voltage along a Kowloon power supply line on Tuesday afternoon.

The Fire Services Department (FSD) said it had handled 179 cases of lift entrapment and 39 false alarms as of 3pm on Tuesday, following a flurry of reports after 1.10pm that was mostly concentrated in Yau Tsim Mong district.

CLP Power, one of the city’s two utility providers, said it detected a “brief yet sudden voltage drop” along a 400-kilovolt power line connecting Lai Chi Kok to Tsz Wan Shan at about 1.09pm on Tuesday, according to local media.

While power supply was not interrupted, the voltage drop might have caused lights to dim or flicker and power-sensitive electronic devices to suspend operation in certain areas of Kowloon and the New Territories, CLP said.

The fire authority received 55 reports of people trapped in lifts and 22 erroneously activated alarms within ten minutes after the voltage drop, according to senior divisional officer Yung Wai-ming.

Four women aged 68 to 71 reported injuries after being trapped in lifts, Yung said, adding that three of them were sent to hospital in a conscious state, after experiencing discomfort and shortness of breath.

The remaining woman refused to go to the hospital after receiving treatment at the scene, Yung said.

The FSD also activated a call-back mechanism and mobilised extra resources to handle the large number of reports at roughly 2pm, he added.

The department took up to 49 minutes to respond to the false alarms, and up to roughly an hour and 20 minutes to handle a lift entrapment report, he said.

CLP said its teams were investigating the cause of the sudden voltage drop and apologised for inconveniencing residents.

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Hans Tse is a reporter at Hong Kong Free Press with an interest in local politics, academia, and media transformation. He was previously a social science researcher, with writing published in the Social Movement Studies and Social Transformation of Chinese Societies journals. He holds an M.Phil in communication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Before joining HKFP, he also worked as a freelance reporter for Initium between 2019 and 2021, where he covered the height - and aftermath - of the 2019 protests, as well as the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.