They used styrofoam cardboards to cover windows to avoid damange, all the way across the building. This was the accelerant. Many resident were complaining in the weeks before of cigarettes left behind by workers all across the scaffold, probably the trigger. The bamboo might have acted as fuel once the temperature reached high enough, and the whole green netting might not have been up to code either.

The whole thing is typical in HK: everyone tries to save a dollar on everything, and you end up with mess like that. They spent years haggling over this renovation and its cost, and probably tried to save money on everything. Now they lost their flats, their lives and their pride.

They will resort to blame "the mainland" for it for sure, but it's just stinginess: the choice of the cheapest contractor, the squeeze on any attempt to pay the fair cost of a work like that, the government mandating mandatory renovations everywhere all the time, the lack of skilled labor in construction because nobody wants to do it or import and train foreigners because that'd spoil their precious island, whatever.

And now we're going through the whole charity theatrics with everyone congratulating each other for bringing biscuits to people who'll spend 10 years in insurance litigation to get 20% of their assets back. What really hurts me the most is we lost a young firefighter, this is heartbreaking more than the rest to me for some reason.

You can follow in English a bit here:

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/33...

https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/society/article/3334435/...