The horrific high-rise fires in Hong Kong can’t pass without acknowledgement. At time of writing, more than 146 people have died and about 100 have not been accounted for. It is awful, by any measure.

But if you were to ask what lessons the disaster has for us, you might be tempted to say, don’t wrap your tall apartment blocks in bamboo and nylon. But that’s way too glib. Maybe the real lesson is to keep on doing what we’re doing, only more so.

We have had two significant combustible cladding fires in high-rise apartments in Australia with a total death toll of zero.

Even so, we have used the fear of a towering inferno to rip the highly flammable panels off our blocks, albeit with considerable financial pain and hassle for those concerned.

Meanwhile, local authorities are enforcing their fire ordinances so that there must be very few buildings with apartments that don’t have working smoke alarms.

The next challenge will be human behaviour. Stop jamming fire doors open or removing the self-closing devices on your front door because it’s more convenient. If there is a fire, and the doors to the fire stairs are open, the smoke will kill at least as many people as the flames.

That’s what happened in this fire three years ago when 17 people died from smoke inhalation in a fire in the Bronx area of New York. A father in his rush to get his children out of their burning flat left their front door open (no self-closing arm attached).

Fire doors leading to the stairwell were open or not functioning properly allowing thick, toxic smoke to spread into the only escape route.If your self-closing device makes your door slam, get it adjusted – don’t disconnect it (which is a breach of by-laws, by the way.)

Stop covering up smoke alarms because your cooking sets them off – cook in a different way that creates less smoke.

Report rented apartments where door lock have been illegally installed on internal doors, blocking potential escape routes from fires. That’s what happened in this fire where one student died and another was permanently disbled when they had to jump out of a window to escape a fire in their flat.

It’s time to stop quibbling over fire safety orders. The challenge must be to make your block safe, not how to ignore council orders to save money – special levies don’t stack up against lost lives

And get tradies and builders to stop cutting through fire-proof walls as if the odd gap or hole is insignificant. Statistically, smoke kills more people in fires than burns do – and smoke will get through any gap that you leave in a wall.

All these little things can add up to one big flaw and if you don’t take the potential for fire in your block seriously, being blamed for a blaze may be the least of your problems.

The Hong Kong fires are a tragic reminder that if we don’t take sensible precautions, we are all at risk. That said, living in an apartment block here in Australia is still as safe as … well … houses.

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