Spanish
The Hong Kong authorities have suspended all exterior rehabilitation work and have given three working days to completely remove the protective netting from the facades of public, private, and official buildings, following last week's fire that has already left almost 160 dead.
The instruction, issued this Wednesday, was activated after the detection of alleged irregularities in certifications intended to accredit the quality and fire performance of the materials used in two residential complexes located in the districts of Chai Wan and North Point.
The national testing body, based in Beijing, cited in the documentation submitted by the responsible teams, denied having issued the reports used to justify the conformity of the meshes and confirmed that the codes and names that appeared in those texts were non-existent.
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The institution also pointed out formal defects in the documents, such as the absence of official emblems and errors in corporate identification. The competent departments in the former British colony began contacting construction companies and site administrations to ensure the execution of the dismantling within the established deadlines. Delays will only be accepted if they are communicated in advance and have a favorable evaluation. The authorities also announced the publication, next week, of a new set of operational guidelines that will impose mandatory sampling on-site and verification in designated laboratories before allowing the placement of any temporary protection system. The instruction matches the progress of investigations into the fire that affected seven towers of a complex inhabited mostly by elderly people and that raised the death toll to 159. Authorities recently reported that seven of the twenty samples of protective mesh analyzed in the damaged towers did not pass fire resistance tests and that the low-quality polyurethane foam sheets located on the scaffolding acted as a decisive accelerator in the vertical spread of the fire through the residential blocks. The Police have carried out new arrests among personnel linked to the supply and maintenance of fire protection devices, which are added to previous arrests of managers, consultants and scaffolding teams investigated for possible crimes of gross negligence and corruption. Security authorities also warned against attempts to exploit the tragedy for alleged destabilizing purposes.
