Infrastructuring as Care: A Trace Ethnography of Breakdown and Repair in Digital Coordination during the 2025 Wang Fuk Court Fire

Abstract

On November 26, 2025, a fire broke out at Wang Fuk Court, a densely populated residential complex in Tai Po, Hong Kong, eventually claiming 168 lives. As official emergency systems were overwhelmed, volunteers created a parallel digital coordination effort of remarkable scale: a Google Spreadsheet listing residents and pets, a Telegram group of over 18,000 members maintaining text-format missing persons lists, and more than ten AI-supported platforms built by volunteers within hours. This thesis examines how this coordination infrastructure emerged, when it broke down, who repaired it, and at what cost.
Situated within Crisis Informatics and informed by Feminist Science and Technology Studies, the study brings together infrastructuring theory and care ethics to argue that crisis-time coordination is not supported by care from the outside but constituted by it: infrastructuring and care, in this case, are the same practice viewed through two vocabularies. The study is grounded in trace ethnography of 30,017 Telegram messages across an eight-day research period, complemented by six interviews with list maintainers, civic hackers, and a social worker.
The findings identify three breakdown moments: traffic overload, data attack, and external raid. The study traces a structural drift from open contribution toward concentrated labor, driven by fact-checking demands, case familiarity, and ethical gravity. Beyond reactive and anticipatory care, the analysis names a third register, ambient care, which sustains the conditions under which coordination remains possible. The case further documents more-than-human care, with pets included in the rescue hierarchy from the earliest hours.

Popular Abstract

Introduction
On 26 November 2025, a fire broke out at the Wang Fuk Court housing estate in Tai Po, Hong Kong, and burned for more than forty-three hours. One hundred and sixty-eight people died. As the towers burned, an online spreadsheet quietly became something its makers never intended: a shared record of who was safe and who was still missing, built and maintained not by the authorities, but by residents and strangers. My thesis follows that spreadsheet through the week that followed, asking how it was built, how it broke under the weight of the disaster, who stayed up through the night to keep mending it and at what cost.

Main text
One hundred and sixty-eight people died in the Wang Fuk Court fire: the deadliest in Hong Kong in nearly eighty years. Behind that number were families who spent days not knowing whether the people they loved were alive, injured, or gone.
We usually tend to think emergency response as sirens, fire trucks and uniformed firefighters. But in the first hours of a disaster, the first responders are almost always informal: not professionals, but neighbors, passers-by, residents who got out and turned around to help, and people who saw the news online. And among the most urgent things they reach for is information, above all for the families desperate to know whether the people they love are safe or still missing. What they need is a tool to gather it.
During this fire, the tool firstly emerged as a Google spreadsheet. A volunteer, used to work with the community, built the first version rapidly: a table organized floor by floor and flat by flat, where family members and neighbors could mark whether the people in a given home were safe or still unaccounted for. It was soon joined by a text-based list shared in a public Telegram group, together with dozens of AI-supported online platforms. Those efforts were all stitched together by volunteers who had never met in person.
Together these tools became something close to infrastructure, the kind of invisible system we rely on without noticing and notice only when it fails. Under the pressure of a real catastrophe, it failed often. It failed in different ways. Some failures were technical: too many people editing at once, links that stopped loading, entries that vanished. Some were about coordination: with several competing lists circulating, no one was certain which was authoritative, or whose responsibility it was to keep it current. And some were human: fatigue, confusion, and the unease of maintaining a public list of names in a politically tense city, where being visible can carry its own risk.
The heart of my study is what happened each time something broke, someone repaired it. The resident who built the first list wrestled with her own hesitation about not knowing whether it would help or not but chose to give it a try. A civic-minded programmer built a sturdier backup when the original began to buckle. A volunteer in a distant time zone took the overnight shift, so the lists stayed accurate while Hong Kong slept. None of this was assigned.
I argue that this work itself is a form of care, and that it carried a real, often hidden cost. Holding a fragile system together meant lost sleep, anxiety, and the strain of being responsible for information that grieving families depended on during the worst hours of their lives.
Why does this matter beyond one fire? Because more and more of our response to crisis now runs on everyday digital tools, kept alive by volunteers whose work is rarely seen, supported, or protected. Understanding how these coordination systems break, and what it asks of the people who mend them, can help communities, technologists, and emergency planners to build better tools that recognized the technical, processual and relational dimensions of it.
To follow events that moved this quickly, I worked from the group's own digital traces, reconstructing almost hour by hour how the lists were created, changed, and rescued. I checked this reconstruction against the volunteers' own accounts.
The clearest lesson was also the quietest. We celebrate the moment something new is built. But this story suggests the deeper work of a crisis lies in what comes after: the patient, unglamorous, exhausting act of keeping a fragile thing from falling apart, by one pair of tired hands after another.

• author: Liu, Yiwen
• supervisor: Misse Wester
• organization: Division of Risk Management and Societal Safety
• course: VBRM15 20261
• year: 2026
• type: H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
• subject: Social Sciences
• keywords: crisis informatics, infrastructure, care ethics, repair, trace ethnography, digital volunteerism, collaborative spreadsheets, Hong Kong, more-than-human care, feminist STS, citizen crisis response, disaster coordination
• language: English
• id: 9232493
• date added to LUP: 2026-06-18 10:48:24
• date last changed: 2026-06-18 10:53:55