Nine months. That's how long it took the Buildings Department to go from "we are investigating" to actually charging anyone over Wang Fuk Court. Today the department laid 259 charges against project consultants. Not the developer's name in lights, not a press conference with tears. Two hundred and fifty-nine separate charge sheets, filed on a Wednesday, against the engineers and consultants who signed off on the building.

168 people died in that fire, and 79 were injured.

Here's the thing about 259 charges. That's not one big case, that's every corner they could find something wrong. Every inspection report, every sign-off, every "yes this is fine" that maybe wasn't. It tells you the fire wasn't one bad decision, it was a lot of small ones stacked up until the building couldn't survive a fire it should have survived. For the families still in temporary housing, it's proof somebody was finally doing the maths instead of just doing the ribbon-cutting.