A Blaze Too Big to Ignore

This past weekend, Hong Kong firefighters extinguished the city’s longest-running fire in 20 years. The four-alarm blaze, in an industrial warehouse-turned-mini storage facility, took more than 108 hours to put out and claimed the lives of two firefighters.

The storage cubicles’ tiny dimensions—they’re described as the size of elevators—as well as the fact that they were separated by metal sheets, which firefighters had to break down to battle the blaze, made the fire particularly dangerous and difficult to extinguish. Mostly though, it was the lack of safety features, such as an automatic sprinkler system, that allowed the fire to rage. Industrial buildings in Hong Kong that were constructed before 1973 are not required to have sprinklers; the warehouse in question was completed in 1961.