Sunday 3 January 2016

Dubai Skyscraper Fire

In New York on September the 11th 2001 three buildings completely disintegrated supposedly due to the damage suffered by the impact of aircraft, two cases, and the subsequent fire; only that in the case of Building Seven. At the time World Trade Centres One and Two were the world's tallest buildings, yet some minor structural damage together with fires stoked by a small amount of jet fuel and office furniture, turned them into a huge cloud of dust and a thin scattering of rubble within a couple of hours. Since then fire as bad as the WTC ones, and worse, have struck down several buildings around the world, and I've made careful note of them:
There have been others such as the Olimp Hotel in Grozny, Chechnya; and the St Peter's Road block in Kingston-upon-Thames, England. The best known and worst case is the Windsor Tower in Madrid that was completely burnt out by an enormous conflagration; yet even then the core structure of the building survived. On New Year's Eve 2015 we had yet another 9/11 no-show, this time in a building constructed since 2001 that is comparable in size to the old World Trade Centre.

The city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is the most ambitious urban planning project in the world; a kind of Milton Keynes writ large. Apparently a quarter of all the building cranes in the world can be found in Dubai and it has even created artificial islands in the shapes of palm trees and maps of the world. It's a showcase of Middle Eastern oil-soaked opulence. The Address Downtown Burj Dubai was completed in 2008 and was at the time the sixth tallest building in the city; today it is the 19th tallest. At 991 feet it is only 377 feet shorter than the WTC Twin Towers. It is made up of a mixture of residential flats and the Address Downtown Hotel. On New Year's Eve 2015 over a hundred thousand people were gathered in the streets of Dubai's spectacular city centre to see in the New Year with a street party and fireworks display. Then smoke and flames were seen to issue from the Address Downtown; this quickly spread to the entire building making it clearly a far worse blaze than any other skyscraper fire that I've noted before, except the Windsor Tower. When a high-rise structure catches fire it creates a particularly dramatic scene; this was what inspired the famous 1974 disaster movie The Towering Inferno, see: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072308/. This film used to be shown regularly on TV, but I've not seen it scheduled for quite a while... for some reason. The emergency services attended the scene and fortunately managed to evacuate all the people in the building; sixteen people were treated for smoke inhalation and one man suffered a heart attack due to the stress, but nobody was killed and all the casualties have recovered. The New Year's firework display went ahead as planned, although it must have been dampened a bit by the huge pall of smoke and the fire still issuing from the building while the fire brigade sprayed it with water. The flames were eventually extinguished, but on New Year's Day morning some smoke was still visible wafting from the high rise. The authorities in Dubai are now trying to work out what caused the fire. Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-35209029. By looking at it, you can see that the Address Downtown is severely scorched and they're definitely going to have to call the builders in big time, but there appears to be no major damage to the building's walls and structural integrity. My money is on the tower being renovated and reopened within a few months. This Wikipedia page has a list of skyscraper fires for a period of a hundred and ten years (Not all of them; it doesn't include St Peter's Road for example): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_fire. There are only three examples noted where fire damage led to "instant full structural collapse"; and even that is a false statement because WTC's 1,2 and 7 did not collapse at all, they turned into a huge cloud of dust, see background links below. Every time one of these incidents takes place, along with the scientific investigation by Dr Judy Wood into the true cause of the WTC destruction, it becomes more and more obvious that the official story of 9/11 is a complete charade.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Totally agree with you Ben. Strange that the sprinkler system did not seem to be effective in sorting out before it got so bad! Wonder if it actually kicked in? Neil

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

It does make me wonder, Neil, what the cause was.

Neil Austin said...

I'm only speculating of course but this could be just a good ol' fashioned, strike-a-match insurance job. As you say Ben, they will rebuild/repair/refurbish no doubt. But
To quote Paul Newman's character 'Doug Roberts' from The Towering Inferno...
"I don't know. Maybe they just oughta leave it the way it is. Kind of a shrine to all the bullshit in the world."
Works for me :-)

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

God I miss that film, Neil. It used to be on TV all the time. Must get the DVD. It wouldn't surprise me. The UAE is incredibly rich and corrupt and Dubai is their flagship city. I wouldn't put anything above them.