Tai Po, Hong Kong: Toby Wong keeps calling his mother. The phone rings, but it’s been two days since she answered. When he last spoke to her, flames were reaching up to her Hong Kong apartment, on the 29th floor of Wang Fuk Court.

“When I called her, she was coughing so I could not hear what she was saying,” the 36-year-old says.

Wong has taken his place in the procession of ashen faces making their way into a community hall turned makeshift victim identification centre in the shadow of Wang Fuk’s burnt-out towers. There, relatives are shown photos of the bodies.

He has already identified his father’s body at a morgue he visited on Thursday as the fire still burnt. Officials say 128 people are now confirmed dead in the blaze. About 200 more, like Wong’s mother, remain missing. And hundreds of shell-shocked survivors are sleeping in malls and shelters.

Wong was at work when the fire broke out in the tower next to the one in which he shared a unit with his parents. He called his father to check on them as soon as he heard the news. At that stage, the blaze hadn’t leapt to the surrounding buildings. By the time he phoned again 10 minutes later, his parents’ tower was engulfed too.

Wong has scoured morgues and hospitals, as well as this identification centre, for answers about his mother’s fate. So far, he hasn’t found any.

Others have found what they had hoped not to. By midday on Friday (3pm AEDT), relatives were arriving at the identification centre in steady numbers. They would emerge a short time later into the embrace of support workers, who used umbrellas and jackets to shield them as they carved a path through the throngs of waiting reporters.

The death toll is already higher than that of the Grenfell Tower fire in London, which killed 72 people in June 2017. It will continue to climb in the coming days as more victims are identified.

Hong Kong authorities confirmed on Friday afternoon that the fire alarm systems in the towers were not working. It is a finding that aligns with reports by survivors that no alarms went off as the fire spread through the complex. The authorities have vowed to take action against those responsible.

By Friday morning, fire crews had mostly extinguished the blaze, which tore through seven of the eight towers in the 2000-unit residential complex in the northern district of Tai Po on Wednesday and raged for nearly two days.

As the heat subsided, teams of firefighters entered the smouldering ruins, their flashlights illuminating blackened, windowless units.

The search-and-rescue mission soon became one focused on recovering bodies, and media crews repositioned their cameras at a side entrance of the complex, where yellow vans were waiting to collect body bags.

A public square near the towers has transformed into a collection hub for donations and a gathering point for survivors, where volunteers hand out food and water and members of the public drop off clothes, bedding and electronics.

Amid the grief, anger is also kindling among Hongkongers as they debate whether this catastrophe – the most deadly fire to affect the city in decades – could have been avoided.

Their attention, and the government’s focus, has homed in on renovation works being undertaken across the towers, which had bamboo scaffolding covered in green mesh erected around the outside, while flammable styrofoam had been used to protect windows.

The exact cause of the fire is not yet known. Hong Kong authorities on Thursday arrested three people – the directors and an engineering consultant of a construction company – on suspicion of manslaughter, and have launched an investigation into whether the mesh and foam acted as an accelerant.

On Friday, they arrested another eight people involved in the towers’ renovation, including scaffolding subcontractors, directors of an engineering consultant company and project managers supervising the renovation, the Independent Commission Against Corruption said.

This fire is the realisation of many people’s fears about Hong Kong’s tightly packed housing blocks, where thousands of residents live in cramped apartments in sprawling high-rise towers.

“I am angry and concerned about building safety in Hong Kong. We have many buildings with multi-storeys and that are getting old and need renovations,” says Ada, who asked to use only her first name.

Her mother escaped the fire, but her brother’s girlfriend, who lived above on the 26th floor of one of the towers, is unaccounted for. Residents made many complaints about the renovations, she says.

“Everyone ignored them. If you want to hold a massive renovation program like the one at this complex, it needs to be properly managed,” she says.

The Hong Kong Labour Department confirmed the existence of complaints, acknowledging in a statement to Bloomberg News that members of the public had raised concerns about “issues relating to the scaffolding” in September 2024. It said it had warned the company doing the renovation about fire hazards just a week ago.

But inspectors had “consistently monitored” the installation of netting wrapped around the towers and found its quality certificate met official fireproof standards, according to the statement.

As he searches for his mother, Wong also wants answers about how this tragedy was allowed to happen.

“Why did the government department approve the use of that material around the outside of the building?”

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