Mourners Honor Victims of Hong Kong Apartment Fire

The police said they expected the death toll of 128 to rise as the authorities began combing through the charred apartment towers.

Hong Kong residents lined up into the night on Saturday to mourn near the site of a fire that killed at least 128 people and displaced thousands, as the authorities began the weekslong work of combing through what remained of seven apartment towers.

The police said they expected the toll to rise in the coming days as they searched the buildings. In addition to the people who lost their lives in the city’s deadliest blaze in decades, at least 83 were injured, and 150 were still unaccounted for on Saturday, according to the authorities.

Three days of official mourning began on Saturday. Chief Executive John Lee and dozens of other government officials gathered in the morning to observe three minutes of silence. Flags across the city were lowered to half-staff, and officials have set up condolence books across Hong Kong’s 18 districts.

Near the site of the fire at Wang Fuk Court, in the northern district of Tai Po, makeshift memorials formed.

By sunset, more than 1,000 people from across the city lined up to leave flowers and handwritten messages in a park across the street from the housing complex.

At a nearby playground, mourners, many dressed in black, placed white roses on the ground and bowed toward the apartment block in the distance. Some left offerings of oranges, bananas, McDonald’s burgers and Kit Kat bars at makeshift altars to help feed the dead, a local practice.

Outside a community hall where family members were gathering to identify photographs of the dead, dozens of bouquets had been placed around a banyan tree. A sign there read: “128+ innocent people died. What did they do wrong?”

Eddie Chiang, a firefighter who said he had been part of a brigade that battled the blaze for 13 hours, returned to the complex on Saturday night. He and his wife, Dana Wong, added a bouquet to a growing mound.

“Maybe I could have done more,” Mr. Chiang said. “I want them to know that they are going to a better place. The pain is over.”

Ms. Wong expressed some of the anger that many have been feeling as the police and anticorruption officials investigate what happened. Eight people have been arrested in an anticorruption bureau investigation, and three by the police on accusations of gross negligence and manslaughter in connection to a contractor that was renovating the buildings.

“This didn’t have to happen,” she said. “It’s a tragedy for the whole of Hong Kong.”

Iris Cheng and Toby Law, who were with their school-age daughter Alva to pay their respects, were among those who lingered after the crowd dissipated, staring up at the blackened towers.

“We realize there’s nothing we can do to help,” Ms. Cheng said. “We wanted to deliver flowers so the dead can rest in peace.”

The fires have prompted an outpouring of support, and people have arrived in Tai Po in droves to manage donation stations. On Saturday, the police cleared a large area where volunteers had set up. The government later said that it had been overwhelmed by donations and urged people to stop taking items to the area.

While the police said on Saturday that they had finished searching two of the buildings that burned, they estimated the rest would take three or four weeks. Lam Man-han, the assistant commissioner of police, said in a news conference that the two buildings were among the least affected and that the search conditions remained challenging. Many apartments were badly damaged and flooded, she said.

Many survivors of the fire, which tore through all but one of the eight towers in Wang Fuk Court, have dispersed around the city to temporary accommodation in hotels and hostels.

Yu Siu Yuen returned to Tai Po on Saturday to register for government services at a secondary school, where displaced residents poured in throughout the day. The government has begun disbursing the equivalent of around $1,300 in subsidies for affected families.

Ms. Yu wore the same navy blue dress and black flats that she wore to work on Wednesday, the day the fire broke out, and carried her 12-year-old miniature poodle, Longjing, in a sling.

Pointing to her blistered feet, she said she badly needed to buy new clothes and shoes. She added that she was slowly coming to terms with the fact that she might never return to her home or live in her neighborhood again.

Wang Fuk Court was built in 1983 as part of a program to help middle-income residents purchase subsidized homes. Ms. Yu’s husband bought their apartment in the 1980s, and she lived there with him for more than 20 years.

“I’ve never seen him cry,” she said of her husband. “Last night, he held me and cried throughout the whole night.”

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