A fire service commander who participated in the Tai Po fire rescue in November said on Thursday that prioritizing the suppression of the fire was a site-based decision, and that the biggest challenge the emergency services had faced when attempting to evacuate the estate was the malfunctioning fire alarm.

He added that the fear of triggering a panicked response prevented the authorities from using the Emergency Alert System (EAS), which was put into service in 2020.

SPECIAL PAGE: Tai Po fire inquiry hearings

The independent inquiry into the Wang Fuk Court fire, which claimed 168 lives, held its 18th hearing on Thursday, summoning two officers from the Fire Services Department (FSD) — Derek Armstrong Chan, deputy director of Fire Services in charge of operations, and Tung Wing-kei, divisional officer overseeing breathing apparatus.

Chan said he joined the FSD in 1998 and was promoted to deputy director in 2023. He was prompted at the inquiry by the leading counsel for the independent committee, Victor Dawes, to address the public’s concerns that earlier evacuation assistance could have reduced casualties.

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Chan said that during the fire, the FSD considered two possible options. One was to concentrate resources on suppressing the fire while police assisted with the evacuation, buying time for residents to escape. The other was to divert personnel to evacuate residents from other blocks, which he believed could accelerate spread of the fire and trap more residents. He ultimately chose the first option, and later concluded — when reviewing the casualty figures after the tragedy — that this had been the more viable option.

He added that burning scaffolding and other debris had been falling while residents were trying to descend from the buildings, and he believed it was necessary to clear a path to ensure residents could escape the scene of the fire.

Chan said that frontline units had tried to activate the fire alarms in Wang Kin House, Wang Sun House and Wang Tao House, but they had not sounded. He said that this had presented the biggest challenge to evacuating the residents, as there was no alternative way to raise an alarm.

Fire engines did sound their sirens, he said, but not continuously, to avoid interfering with communications.

Responding to a question from Dawes, Chan said the department had not forgotten about the government-developed EAS, which disseminates time-critical public announcements via mobile networks during emergencies.

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He said that the circumstances required “localized one-on-one communication with specific residents in the affected buildings, rather than a broadcast to the general public”. As there had been no public education on how to respond to the ESA under such circumstances, the FSD had no way of predicting how residents would react — people might have panicked, which would have worsened the situation.

Dawes said that the most urgent need was to alert residents to the fire. Chan said that if the ESA is to be used in future, there would have to be more public education about how to react to the system.

In his testimony, Chan also said he had never had to deal with a fire that spread rapidly from one building to another in succession — he’d only needed to tackle fires in single buildings. He agreed that the challenges faced at Wang Fuk Court were "unprecedented".

Regarding public criticism that the fire had not been upgraded from a No 5 alarm to a disaster alert, Chan said that a disaster-level classification applies to multiple fires across the city, exhausting all resources and possibly requiring assistance from People's Liberation Army Hong Kong Garrison, which wasn't the case at Wang Fuk Court.

However, he acknowledged that upgrading the fire to a No 4 alarm earlier might have helped, and said that future escalation guidelines should consider such scenarios.

Contact the writer at amberwu@chinadailyhk.com