Garley Building
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The Garley Building (traditional Chinese: 嘉利大廈) was a 15-storey commercial building in on Nathan Road, in Jordan, Kowloon, Hong Kong. It suffered a catastrophic fire on 20 November 1996, with the loss of 41 lives and 80 injuries, the greatest from a building fire in Hong Kong during peacetime, and the most since the Happy Valley Racecourse fire prior to World War II. Curiously, the fire had burned the bottom two floors and the top three floors of the building, with the middle floors remaining relatively intact.
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[edit] The great fire of Garley Building
Prior to the fire, the Garley Building was undergoing an internal facelift project, in which new elevators were to be installed. At the time of the fire, one was completely refurbished, with another mostly complete. The other two elevator shafts in the building had their elevators removed, and bamboo scaffolding installed within the shaft. The fire-resistant elevator doors were also removed, to allow light into the elevator shaft so welders could see clearly.
The welding was revealed to be the source of the fire, as well as the relative inaction of the building's occupants moments after the fire had started. The welding activity routinely triggered alarms from the building's smoke detectors, so much that staff at the China Arts and Crafts store that occupied the bottom three floors wrapped plastic covers over the smoke detectors to muffle the sound. Furthermore, the welders were found to have, contrary to building codes, also cut metal with the welder. Thus, when a stray piece of heated metal fell from the thirteenth floor sparked a fire on the second floor lift lobby, no one paid any special attention to it, believing that it was part of the normal welding activity. It was, in fact, a welder who discovered the fire, and alerted the fire department. A second emergency call would be made minutes later, when a dental assistant on the 13th floor discovered dense smoke in the hallway.
The fire consumed the bamboo scaffolding, and, combined with the open elevator shaft providing a source of fresh air, provided a chimney effect that eventually rose to the 13th floor, starting another fire there.
When firefighters (who had at the time known about the lower fire) first arrived at the scene ten minutes after the lower fire had started, the fire was rated at one alarm, and was almost immediately raised to three alarms when heavy smoke impeded firefighters' process up higher floors. By the time reinforcements arrived, it was upgraded to a four-alarm fire, and two hours later, a five-alarm fire, a fire of the most severe level in Hong Kong.
All in all, over 200 firemen and 40 engines were deployed. A UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was also deployed to rescue persons who were trapped on the roof, but quickly left after rescuing four people after fears that the rotating helicopter blades were making the fire worse.
With the elevators unusable and the staircases impassable due to the smoke, firefighters had difficulty reaching the upper levels of the building, relying on four rescue ladders to rescue occupants who had opened the windows for fresh air.
Among those that were trapped due to the upper fire were 22 workers in the Chau Sang Sang jewelry store's accounting and information technology departments. Their office doors had locked as the fire alarm was sounded, therefore suffocating the majority of the staff. Some of them managed to safely exit the building by jumping four floors onto the roof of a nearby building, suffering minor injuries in the process. A 15-year-old student who had been waiting for a friend in a doctor's office fell 13 floors onto a second-story roof awning and survived. However, many of the occupants would not survive the fire, as the process of opening a window also caused a flashover that consumed most of them.
The fire continued to burn out of control for another 20 hours, long into the night and into the following morning, and was completely extinguised after another hour. In total, 39 people had died, the majority from the flashover, and one firefighter was killed after accidentally falling into an elevator shaft. Another person eventually died several months later after entering a vegetative state as a result of the fire. Another 80 people were injured, including 14 firemen.
[edit] Aftermath
Investigations by the government following the fire revealed that many commercial buildings constructed at around the same period lacked sufficient fire safety standards. The normally fire-resistant doors that were to be kept shut at all times were sometimes open, and much of the fire-resistant office doors were replaced with glass doors, which simply melted when flashover occurred. They had also found that the building lacked automatic sprinklers, which would have easily contained the lower fire if they had been installed. However, much of the blame fell on the welders and occupants of the building, who were not properly trained in fire drills and knew little about building evacuation procedures.
As a result of the fire, building regulations were quickly revised to prevent this sort of disaster from occurring again - indeed, after the revisions, there has not been a single year in which more than ten people had died from fires.
The Discovery Channel series Blueprint for Disaster documented the events of the fire and subsequent investigation, labelling it the Hong Kong Inferno.
[edit] Reconstruction
The Garley Building was never reoccupied after the fire, but was not demolished until 2003 due to the difficulty of finding the owners of the businesses within. The building has been torn down at the time of 2006. The original landlord of the building, China Resources Enterprise Limited, intends to construct a shopping mall at the original site.
[edit] References
- A varied and interesting career. Interview with Senior Superintendent Chan Chin-cheung, in Offbeat, the internal magazine of the Hong Kong Police, issue 754.
