Hong Kong's fire fighters will long remember 1996. Two infernos dominated the news pages of the South China Morning Post for weeks at a time. Indeed, the community is still coming to terms with the biggest of the disasters, the Garley building fire in which 40 people died.
It was the worst fire in Hong Kong's modern history. The second tragedy occurred in stark contrast to this urban setting: on an idyllic escarpment of one of Hong Kong's most beautiful country parks, Pat Sin Leng range.
Hill fires are common in Hong Kong but what made this incident so appalling in the eyes of the public was not simply the death toll of three schoolchildren and two teachers but the images of children desperately scrambling for their lives up a steep and rocky track with flames racing behind them.
There was a huge outpouring of grief as a result of both of these tragedies. Television images of pupils standing in the playground at Fung Yiu King Memorial Secondary School hugging each other, shocked by the death of their teachers and friends just two days before, remain forged in the minds of many.
And few who saw the graphic television footage of flames leaping from the Garley building and a charred body silhouetted against the flames will forget the anguished faces of those trapped and trying to catch the attention of people on the street.
The Fire Services Department will enter 1997 wiser, with several recommendations being acted on as a result of the lessons learned. Both disasters exposed flaws in operations.