Hazy air laced with a pungent odour, dark rooms filled with debris, bodies that had to be carefully extracted by hand. The discovery of a dead child.
The head of the police team responsible for the search of the Hong Kong residential complex destroyed in an inferno gave an account on Wednesday of the harrowing conditions they faced inside the seven towers as work came to an end.
The task of checking the more than 1,000 flats at Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po was both physically and emotionally challenging, said Superintendent Cheng Ka-chun, the officer in charge of the Disaster Victim Identification Unit.
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“Our colleagues, in a bid to keep the bodies more intact for their return to their families, chose to dig for the bodies using their hands, touching sand, mud and polluted water,” he said, explaining why his team had decided to recover the corpses by hand instead of using equipment.
“Their only goal was to preserve the integrity of the bodies.”
As of Wednesday, a week after the inferno began at Wang Cheong House, police have tallied 159 deaths, with the victims ranging in age from one to 97. Commissioner of Police Joe Chow Yat-ming has said the toll may rise further.