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.
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.
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