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.
See here for background:
http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/ben-emlyn-jones-on-ktpf-911-debate.html.
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
ReplyDeleteIt does make me wonder, Neil, what the cause was.
ReplyDeleteI'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
ReplyDeleteTo 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 :-)
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.
ReplyDelete