Warnings Ignored, Lives Lost: What Wang Fuk, Grenfell and Champlain Teach Us About High‑Rise Failure

There is something eerily familiar about Wang Fuk, the world's latest tall building fire. It channels Grenfell, and to a certain extent Champlain Towers (Surfside). The warnings. The multiplicity of responsible parties. The failure by any of them to intercede and address the dangers as a whole.

What happened at Wang Fuk Court?

Seven of the eight towers at Wang Fuk Court in Hong Kong caught fire on 26 November 2025. This tragedy killed 168 occupants and displaced thousands. This tragedy comes eight years after 72 lost their lives at Grenfell Towers in London, England, and four years after 98 died at Champlain Towers East in Miami, Florida. A trilogy of tragedies. Three communities united in grief. United by circumstance.

What do Wang Fuk, Grenfell, and Champlain have in common?

All three are multi-owned properties. They each involved fragmentation of private ownership and a multiplicity of overriding regulatory bodies. Of the three, Grenfell and Wang Fuk have the most in common. Both originated as social - subsidised housing. Both were refurbishment projects. Both involved flammable products, and fire caused the fatalities. The loss of life at Champlain, also an ageing building, was due to structural defects.

Investigations into the cause of each case continue. These events were long in the making. They are proving long in the forensic analysis. We now have early reports on Wang Fuk, adding to the extensive reports and enquiries about Grenfell and Champlain. There is a pattern emerging in high-rise building disasters:

·            residents warned

·            owners prevaricated

·            regulators shirked

·            suppliers deceived

·            experts underestimated

·            contractors profited

·            people died.

Why have we not had loss of life in high-rise disasters in Australia?

Australia has so far been spared the loss of life from a catastrophic failure of a tall building. But we are not without our problems. We have had evacuations: Lacrosse Melbourne 2014, Opal Tower Sydney 2018, Neo Melbourne 2019, and Mascot Towers Sydney 2019. Two combustible cladding fires and two structural defect cases. Are we better at designing safer buildings? Are we better at disaster response? Or are we just lucky? The stakes are so high this warrants further study.

Next week, 50 of the world’s leading experts in strata, condo, and leasehold will gather in Sydney at the International Forum on Multi-Owned Property, and discuss these issues.

What have governments done since these disasters?

At IFMOP (Spain, 2024), Professor Evan McKenzie (USA) noted that the response after Grenfell and Champlain had focused mainly on regulation – placing more obligations on the owners and significantly taking away elements of self-determination. He observed little in the way of ‘constituent’ policy reform, where government reorganises itself to accomplish an objective. For example, by creating a new government agency.

While this is true of the American response, my research, to be presented next week, shows significant constituent policy reform in England and New South Wales. In both places, new regulatory authorities have been established. And in both places, the government has set up programs to support the innocent. They’re not just passing new laws to enforce building safety behaviour. In America? Not so much.

What remains to be understood?

In a more recent publication on reforms since Champlain, McKenzie (2025) makes a challenging observation: no study has looked into why owners didn't act when they knew a catastrophic loss was possible. He thinks it’s because the owners feared they couldn't afford it. This leads him to call for a paradigm shift in the way we approach the problem of unfunded repairs and maintenance.

McKenzie wants a national study of current funds held by condos to effect repairs, and condo owners’ ability to fund shortfalls to bring buildings back to fit for purpose. He floats the idea of low-cost government-backed funding for catch-up.

These are big ideas from one of the world’s big thinkers on multi-owned properties. Even though there has been no loss of life from at-risk high-rise buildings in Australia (so far), prevention is better than cure. These are big ideas worth pursuing.