A fire broke out at a rooftop dwelling on a Hung Hom building late Wednesday night, forcing one man to make the split-second decision to jump from his roof to an adjacent property as smoke billowed behind him.
The man, who leapt a distance of around three meters from the top of his building on Wa Fung Street, did not suffer any injuries, Hung Hom Bay district councilor Pius Yam wrote in a Facebook update.
The fire started at around 11pm in the back staircase of the building’s eighth floor and spread to a shack on the rooftop, Apple Daily reported. Around 40 residents were evacuated as firefighters rushed to the scene to put out the blaze.
According to the narration of a nearby resident who captured the jump on video, the man was balancing on an air conditioning unit outside the building and clutching a phone before making the leap.
The man, of South Asian descent, then walked down to the park where police officers and other evacuees had gathered. He appeared unscathed, but declined to answer reporters’ questions about his narrow escape.
Authorities are investigating the cause of the fire. No injuries were reported.
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Located on the tops of tenement buildings and hidden away from plain sight, rooftop dwellings are illegal structures rented by the city’s poor who have endured years of being on the waitlist for public housing.
The shacks are constructed out of corrugated metal sheets and tarpaulin, putting them at the mercy of typhoons, cold temperatures and the blistering summer heat. The squalid homes, rife with structural and safety problems, are often subdivided to fit multiple families.
Around 10,000 low-income residents in Hong Kong live in rooftop dwellings, non-profit group Society for Community Organization (SOCO) estimates.
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