BREAKING: Huge fire in Dubai hotel skyscraper

a reply to: JuJuBee

Too soon to tell if there was structural damage I dare say,
I suggest you will cope better with with this Dubai fire if you cease to think all building fires are the exactly same in structure, building, engineering and flammable conditions as any other.

You can't treat every building fire the same, the conditions are different.
My house fire was different to another house fire that happened the next day a suburb away, mine burnt to the ground, theirs burnt through the right wing only.
Relax .

originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: ISawItFirst

I don;t know how to respond to your post, you say no windows were broken and the fire "only burned on the exterior".Thats highly improbable because windows have seals of rubber and sealant of some sort, melting and burning to release the window from its frame, exposing the interior to flame, and if not, the heat alone lapping at the window from the outside would heat the interior of the glass enough to set any interior window dressing like blinds or curtains alight, thus lighting the rooms interior.

I would welcome any link you have supporting your claim that only the facade burned. Sorry, I haven't read the whole thread.

You can create theories in your mind all you like, I cant link to my body of professional experience.

I would recommend you peruse the Underwrites Laboratories listings for skyscraper exterior assemblies. The do not rate materials, they rate assemblies. The 'rubber' you speak of is fire resistant. The entire assembly will be rated by its weakest link. The entire assembly will have a minumum 2 hour rating for a shell aseembly.

This is not even mentioning the window thermal seals, or energy reflective coatings.

Every news story i saw claimed only the facade burned.

A proper pre action sprinkler head, and most probably a standard head would have popped long before the blinds reached their spontaneous ignition temperature. So even if it did act as you say, it is still probable that only the facade burned.

But it didnt do as you say. Glass is not burning at the temperatures here, and is in fact reflecting a great deal of heat away from the building. Not just passing it through. In fact the large windows would make a nice barrier the fire had to overcome to get to the next balcony. And a great heat sink for the sprinklers to work against should they pop on the interior. Which I doubt they would have anyways.

If the fire was hot enough to do as you say, we would be looking at a pile of rubble. (Actually it would look more like a burned up skeleton, depending on building construction type, as per IBC, but i dont want to start that argument, especially not knowing which type of construction it was. Most probably IIB, IIRC, but it has been years since i dealt with tall building building types.)

a reply to: ISawItFirst

Wow, there is a ton of information out there for those who wish to research.

It appears these buildings are built, like many over there, with a polyurethane and aluminam cladding material that was outlawed in 2013 due to flammability concerns.

Someone had a fry up too close (my opinion, but cause seems immaterial at this point) and the whole cladding went up like flash paper.

Its apparently a known issue over there, and I wouldnt be surprised if there were similar building elsewhere in the world.

Exterior sprinkler systems are one of the proposed solutions. No one wants to pay.


As it appearred to me, from the beginning, and ill analagize it this way:

This building got his shirt burned off. Maybe a little minor scarring, but to quote from another thread, it was not, 'skin graft bad'.

ETA. Im a little burned up, pun intended, that none of this is mentioned in any story. The manufacturer must be protected, and or these construction types are more common than we would like to know. It took me all of 90 seconds to doscover what happened here, wtf are journalists paid for. It would be good to know if yiu lived or worked in one of these buildings that the cladding can go up like paper, and that it is unlikely to be catastrophic, but serious nonetheless. How can people make informed decisions when our press is so miserable. /weakrant

a reply to: Xtrozero

Flaming plastics drip down and ignite the stuff below.

Got a pic showing that only the facade burned? I'll settle for that.

I brought one, but its hard to tell.

I have read a lot about this thread earlier. But what I was reading then was why isn't this one burning like the old one .It wasn't slammed

With fuel

I'm just a guy trying to say if you don't what jet fuel heat, and slamming is you might not know nothing. ...... reply to: THEREDUNDANT1

So apparently this is the cause:

Dubai: An electrical short circuit was the reason for a huge fire at The Address Downtown Dubai hotel on New Year's Eve, forensic experts said on Wednesday.

Dubai Police said the electric fault in a spotlight is used to illuminate the hotel had caused the massive flames that broke out at the hotel.

The blaze started in the cables of a spotlight on the ledge between the 14th and 15th floors of the 63-storey hotel, according to Ahmad Mohammad Ahmad, Head of the Forensics and Mechanical Engineering Department at the General Department of Forensic Science and Criminology of Dubai Police.

The information was released at a press conference at the Dubai Police Headquarters.

No deaths were attributed to the fire, said police. Some 15 people were injured and one man suffered a heart attack during the evacuation process.

fire-at-addres s-hotel-on-new-year-s-eve-caused-by-electrical-fault-dubai-police

a reply to: [post=20208001]matafuchs[/post
So reminiscent of 9/11. Good days to bury bad news...