Bye Bye Filmark

Tomas Tang's FILMARK INTERNATIONAL was the most direct opponent to Joseph Lai's IFD FILMS & ARTS LTD. Their rivalry was only a fact in the international video markets, they had their offices door to door in the Garley's Gallery in Kowloon, they shared their starts & technicians till the day a big disaster took the building & Tomas Tang and his company dissapeared into the towering inferno.

The last day of Filmark international!

The following info about the fire that destroyed Garley's Gallery has been taken & resumed from Wikipedia.

The Garley Building (traditional Chinese: 嘉利大廈) was a 15-story commercial building on Nathan Road, in Jordan, Kowloon, Hong Kong. It suffered a catastrophic fire on 20 November, 1996, with the loss of 41 lives and 80 injuries, the greatest from a building fire in Hong Kong during peacetime, and the most since the Happy Valley Racecourse fire prior to World War II. Curiously, the fire damaged the bottom two floors and the top three floors of the building, while the middle floors remained relatively intac It was a catastrophe that caused the loss of 41 lives and 81 injuries. The land lot was bought by Kai Yee Investment Company Ltd in 1970 when it cost just $1.56 million.

Fire

At the time of the fire, the Garley Building was undergoing internal renovation, in which new elevators were to be installed; one had been completely refurbished, with another almost completed. The other two elevator shafts in the building had had their elevators removed, and bamboo scaffolding installed within the shaft. The fire-resistant elevator doors were also removed to allow light into the elevator shaft so welders could see clearly. The welding was revealed to be the source of the fire. A UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was also deployed to rescue people trapped on the roof, but quickly left after rescuing four people as it was feared that the rotating helicopter blades were making the fire worse. The role of the helicopter was later studied.

With the elevators unusable and the staircases impassable due to the smoke, firefighters had difficulty reaching the upper levels of the building, relying on four rescue ladders to rescue occupants who had opened the windows for fresh air. The flame was finally put out after 21 hours. For this incident much of the blame fell on the welders and occupants of the building, who were not properly trained in fire drills and knew little about building evacuation procedures. As a result of the fire, building regulations were quickly revised to prevent this sort of disaster from occurring again - indeed, since the revisions, there has not been a single year in which more than ten people have died from fires.

Cultural references

The Discovery Channel series '''' documented the events of the fire and subsequent investigation, labeling it the ''Hong Kong Inferno''.

Reconstruction

The Garley Building was abandoned after the fire, but was not demolished until 2003, due to the difficulty of finding the owners of the businesses within. The original landlord of the building, China Resources Enterprise, originally intended to construct a "Ginza-style" shopping mall at the site, but later changed plans to build a new office building. Work on the building was completed in 2007.