Survivors tell of fire terror

Terrified survivors of yesterday's Ma Tau Wai fire told of their desperation as they tried to flee a building filled with smoke and flames and found escape doors locked.

Christine Kong Mei-wah, 58, a retired banker, was trapped with 13 others on the seventh floor after she found access to the rooftop blocked.

'I think I am really lucky,' said Kong, who lives on the third floor of the tenement building that caught fire in the small hours, killing four people and injuring 19.

'We survived because we did not panic although the smoke was really thick and my throat felt very painful.'

Kong was woken by screaming and smelled heavy smoke in her flat. She woke four other tenants but the front door was too hot to be opened so they took the rear staircase to the top, where they could not unlock the door to the roof. 'Many people were screaming downstairs so we did not dare go down,' she said. 'The staircase was full of rubbish, like bamboo sticks, unused mattresses and flowerpots. It was very difficult to walk. We all needed to take every step very carefully.'

She said the deaths were probably caused by sub-divided rental cubicles that blocked the rear doors in other flats. 'The people from sub-divided rental cubicles could only escape from the front, while we could escape from both ends,' she said.

Kong's flat, which she owns, is not sub-divided but she has rented two rooms to four tenants.