Posted on 07/20/2016 6:11:44 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Residents were forced to flee after a blaze broke out in a 75-storey residential tower in Dubai Marina on Wednesday afternoon.
The fire, believed to have started on the 60th floor of the Sulafa Tower about 2.45pm, spread quickly in the strong wind and damaged apartments on eight floors.
Civil Defence workers evacuated nearby buildings and blocked roads to prevent injuries from falling debris, leading to traffic chaos as hundreds gathered to watch the blaze.
A British resident of Sulafa Tower was among them, anxiously awaiting news of her cat.
“We really don’t know where to turn or what to do now," she said. “We are in shock.
“I rent on the 25th floor. It was such a beautiful flat. I was at work when I heard about the fire and came straight home.
The tower is one of the 25 tallest buildings in Dubai and 130 tallest in the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at thenational.ae ...
I sure as heck don’t ever want to live in a connected building with others, much less a towering inferno. Trump Towers not withstanding.
Must still be Ramadan.
Let them eat cake.
There’s something very Potemkin Village about Dubai, all the glitter and grandeur seems to have a nasty habit of turning out to be ill-considered and shoddily constructed. Sinking islands, skyscrapers burning. Something is very wrong about that place.
It could be worse.
No one flew a plane into it.
And we aren’t dancing in the streets and handing out candy over it.
Dubai has a lot of slave laborers to rebuild those towers, I hear.
I can tell all about this. I just spent the last several years in construction in that part of the world. The issue with MOST of these Dubai fires (not all) is a wdely used cladding product that is basically a thin metal finish over a substrate that is basically a thermo-plastic. These products are terrible from a fire standpoint and the fires spread very quickly. However, as long as the rest of the building meets a semblance of code, they are not automatically dangerous fires to the occupants because the fires spread quickly up the sides and consume the plastic in the panels very quickly. The underlying reinforced concrete structures are not impacted and the glass can handle the heat for awhile. So the fire stays essentially outside looking scary, but allwing folks plenty of time to evacuate. For more info see... http://al-bab.com/blog/2016/01/dubai-fire-question-cladding
Interesting!
Why are the fires occurring in UAE and not elsewhere? Is the cladding product only used there?
Would you guess the building is sprinkled? Seems a lot of fire if it was.
Sprinklers are only inside the building and most of these fires are on the outside. If they begin to spread inside for whatever reason, the sprinlkers would go off then. Sprinklers only go off one by one when they are exposed to heat. It’s not like the movies where they all go off at the same time. There are special systems like that, but not in office and apartment buildings.
Dubai has a high concentration of these buildings all built with this same materials about the same time. I think these materials come from China. Also, it rarely rains and it is very hot, so the materials are extremely dry.
Interesting, thanks for the info.
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