Just past 3 p.m., William Li received an unexpected call from his wife, alerting him to a fire in their building. She had heard the news from a friend while at work.

In Li’s second-floor apartment, there were no fire alarms, smoke, or any burning smell to suggest urgency. As he was enjoying a day off, the 40-year-old office worker decided to change out of his pajamas before venturing outside.

However, when he finally opened his door eight minutes after the call, he was met with dense, black smoke, making escape impossible.

“Everything turned pitch black,” Li recounted to The Associated Press. “I realized I was in deep trouble.”

This was merely the start of the catastrophic blaze at the Wang Fuk Court complex, located on the fringes of Hong Kong. The fire raged for over 40 hours, consuming seven out of the eight buildings in the complex before being subdued on Friday morning. Tragically, it resulted in at least 128 fatalities, with many still missing, marking the deadliest fire in Hong Kong since 1948.

Fire spread through scaffolding

From Li’s apartment near ground zero where the fire broke out, the flames shot up bamboo scaffolding covered with nylon netting that had been erected for construction work. It ignited polystyrene panels that had been placed over windows and blew out the glass, allowing the blaze to spread inside. Winds helped the fire jump from building to building.

Authorities are investigating whether the netting covering the bamboo scaffolding, commonly used in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia, met fire-safety requirements; why windows were covered with foam panels; and why fire alarms did not sound.

Already police have arrested three people — the directors of a construction company and an engineering consultant — and Hong Kong’s anti-corruption authorities have arrested a further eight including scaffolding subcontractors, directors of an engineering consulting company and the renovation project managers.

The complex is in Tai Po, a market town that in the late 1970s was designated as a “new town”, with many high-rise apartments built. The district is now home to about 300,000 of the city’s 7.5 million population, a mix of affluent, middle-class and lower-income groups.

A quiet neighbourhood amid Hong Kong’s bustle

Li grew up in the Wang Fuk Court complex, while resident Ding Chan and her husband moved there as adults as soon as it was built in the early 1980s, lured by the appeal of the quiet suburban neighbourhood north of Hong Kong, far away from the city’s commercial centre.

Chan had left her apartment a half-hour before the fire broke out and was at work as a cleaner when she started receiving frantic calls from friends about the blaze.

“I did not believe it at first,” the 70-year-old told the AP.

By the time she got back to the housing estate shortly after 3pm — about the same time Li’s wife was calling him with her warning — she could see the flames already spreading quickly and it wasn’t long before it reached her own building, and there was nothing she could do but watch.

“I had never seen such a massive fire in my entire lifetime,” she said.

Her husband, IN Kong, who is also 70, was also fortunately not at home when the fire broke out.

But Chan, who juggles two jobs and often works six days a week, and her husband who works as an electrician, are now faced with having to rebuild their lives from scratch.

Their unit, which they spent more than a decade paying off, is likely uninhabitable now and Chan said they did not know how they were going to survive for the next months, let alone the longer term future.

They have been put up temporarily in a local hotel, but don’t know what comes next.

“I haven’t slept for two nights,” she said. “Where am I going to stay?”

The government has made emergency assistance available to residents, and donations have also been pouring in, but it was not yet clear what long-term financial aid those in need will receive.

Of the more than 4600 residents in Wang Fuk Court, more than one-third are over 65, like Chan and her husband, according to Midland Realty data based on the 2021 census.

Some 900 people were taken to emergency shelters in the immediate aftermath of the fire, and hundreds of volunteers, including off-duty nurses, social workers and psychological counselors, flocked to the district to offer help.

Sharing his story to help the community heal

Li took to social media to share his ordeal, posting details on Friday on a Tai Po Facebook group, writing he hoped to help the community “heal and rebuild together.” By Saturday morning it had generated more than 1000 comments and had been shared nearly 10,000 times.

After being blasted by smoke when he first tried to venture into the hallway, Li quickly retreated back into his apartment.

He described hearing explosions, and a photo he snapped shows his room illuminated by the glow of flames outside the window. He told the AP he thought of jumping, but instead decided to wait for rescue.

He called police to report the predicament, put wet towels down to block smoke coming in from under his door and called his wife to tell her he couldn’t get out.

“Everyone told me to wait,” he said.

Hearing voices from the hall, he decided to brave the smoke and went into the corridor where he found two bewildered neighbours who were trying to escape, and led them back to shelter in his apartment.

“I asked them why they had left their own home instead of waiting inside,” he said. “They told me it was because their window had overheated and shattered from the fire and the fire rushed into their home.”

Seeing flames closing in, he began to worry his apartment would soon suffer the same fate.

“That was the moment I began to feel death was very close to me,” he said. “I was terrified, helpless, because I knew my escape route, the doorway, was no longer safe. In that instant I felt powerless, as if there was nothing I could do except wait.”

Not sure what else to do, the father of two reached out to friends for comfort.

“I started telling my friends to help take care of my family,” he said. “I felt like I was facing the end of my life.”

His mother, who lives in Britain, called in panic. “I could only tell her not to worry,” he said.

In the end, help arrived before the flames.

About 5pm, about two hours after his wife called to warn him, firefighters got a ladder to the scaffolding outside his window.

Li told the firefighters to take his older neighbours first, helping them out the small window onto the scaffolding, which they crawled along until they reached the ladder.

“Once my two neighbours had been rescued, I was left alone in the flat,” he recalled.

“At that moment my feelings were very heavy, because I knew I had to leave this home, and that it might be swallowed by the fire — I felt reluctant, but I had no choice. I had to escape.”

As he climbed down the ladder, firefighters yelled at him to cover his head due to falling debris, while hosing him down with water to protect him from the flames.

“The cold water drenched my whole body and the emotions were overwhelming, hard to describe,” he said. “But I felt very lucky.”

Dozens of residents on higher floors of the 32-storey buildings were trapped even longer, as firefighters battled extreme heat to conduct door-to-door searches. Li said he had only moved down to the second floor in September, and said he had heard that his former neighbours on the 29th floor had all perished in the blaze.

About two hours after getting rescued, Li finally got to see his wife, son and daughter, who had been watching the blaze from outside, in an emotional reunion.

“My wife cried until her tears were completely dry, unable to cry anymore,” he said. “My daughter immediately rushed over to hug me saying, ‘daddy didn’t die, daddy didn’t die’. My son sat quietly to the side, very calm, but tears kept streaming down his face.”

Like Chan and her husband, and most other residents of the apartment complex, Li is now left wondering what will come next for him and his family even with the outpouring of support now being offered.

“No matter how many supplies are given, they are of little use — we can only carry what our two hands can hold, even if more is given we have no place to put it,” he said Saturday.

“Still, I am very grateful, Hong Kong people are full of compassion, constantly helping, donating generously,” he said. “At this moment, we haven’t yet seen all the stuff, but I will look around and see what can help us.”