DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - Within minutes, the
revelry of New Year's Eve in Dubai turned to horror as those gathered for
fireworks downtown watched flames race up the side of one of the glistening
city's most prominent luxury hotels.
But the fire at the 63-story The Address Downtown Dubai
wasn't the first, second or even third blaze to spread swiftly along the
exterior of skyscrapers that have risen from the desert at a torrid pace in and
around Dubai over the past two decades.
It was at least the eighth such fire in the Emirates
alone, and similar blazes have struck major cities across the world, killing
dozens of people, according to an Associated Press survey.
The reason, building and safety experts say, is the
material used for the buildings' sidings, called aluminum composite panel
cladding. While types of cladding can be made with fire-resistant material,
experts say those that have caught fire in Dubai and elsewhere weren't designed
to meet stricter safety standards and often were put onto buildings without any
breaks to slow or halt a possible blaze.
While new regulations are now in place for construction
in Dubai and other cities, experts acknowledge they have no idea how many skyscrapers
have the potentially combustible paneling and are at risk of similar
fast-moving fires.
"It's like a wildfire going up the sides of the
building," said Thom Bohlen, chief technical officer at the Middle East
Center for Sustainable Development in Dubai. "It's very difficult to
control and it's very fast. It happens extremely fast."
Cladding came into vogue over a decade ago, as Dubai's
building boom was well underway. Developers use it because it offers a modern
finish to buildings, allows dust to wash off during rains, and is relatively
simple and cheap to install.
Dubai has since burgeoned into a cosmopolitan business
hub of more than 2 million people. As in other Emirati cities, foreign
residents far outnumber the local population. Expatriate professionals in
particular are drawn to the ear-popping apartments the city's hundreds of
high-rises offer, and skyscraper hotels accommodate millions of guests each
year. The city-state aims to attract 20 million visitors annually by the time
it hosts the World Expo in 2020.
That means the risk of high-rise fires touches people
from all over the world.
Typically, the cladding is a half-millimeter (0.02-inch)
thick piece of aluminum attached to a foam core that is sandwiched to another
similar skin. The panels are then affixed to the side of a building, one piece
after another.
The biggest problem lies with panel cores that are all or
mostly polyethylene, a common type of plastic, said Andy Dean, the Mideast head
of facades at the engineering consultancy WSP Global.
"The ones with 100-percent polyethylene core can
burn quiet readily," Dean said. "Some of the older, even fire-rated
materials, still have quite a lot of polymer in them."
The panels themselves don't spark the fires, and the
risks can be lessened if they are installed with breaks between them to curb a
fire's spread. The panels' flammability can be significantly reduced by
replacing some of the plastic inside the panels with material that doesn't burn
so easily.
However, when installed uninterrupted row after row, more
flammable types of cladding provide a straight line of kindling up the side of
a tower.
That was the case in 2012 when a spate of fires struck
Dubai and the neighboring emirate of Sharjah. Blaze after blaze, though some
ignited differently, behaved the same way: fire rushed up and down the sides of
the buildings, fueled by the external panels.
The day after an April 2012 fire at a 40-story building
in Sharjah, Dubai issued new building regulations barring the use of cladding
constructed with flammable material. Officials elsewhere in the United Arab
Emirates followed suit, though by that time, the building boom had subsided in
the wake of a global recession.
But the rules did not call for retrofitting buildings
with flammable cladding already installed - nor is there any clear idea of how
many of these buildings stand in Dubai or the UAE's other six emirates.
Local experts have suggested as many as 70 percent of the
towers in the Dubai may contain the material, though they acknowledge the
figure is only an estimate as there are apparently no official records.
"There's an exposure because there's a lot of them
and unfortunately they don't come with an 'X' on the building to know which
ones they are," said Sami Sayegh, global property executive in the Middle
East and North Africa for insurance giant American International Group, Inc.
Emaar Properties, which developed The Address Downtown
and nearby properties including the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building,
said authorities are still investigating the New Year's Eve fire. It has hired
an outside contractor to assess and restore the damaged tower, and it plans to
reopen the hotel, based on orders from Dubai's ruler himself. It has not
released specific details about the type of cladding used.
However, The National, a state-owned newspaper in Abu
Dhabi, has reported that the cladding used on The Address Downtown was the
fire-prone type seen in other blazes.
Lt. Col. Jamal Ahmed Ibrahim, director of preventive
safety for Dubai Civil Defense, said authorities take the issue of cladding
fires seriously and are committed to "finding solutions and stopping these
accidents from happening."
A nationwide survey of existing buildings has been
ordered in the wake of The Address fire, and additional guidelines will be put
in place in March to ensure new buildings are constructed to a higher standard,
he said.
However, Ibrahim insisted that the type of cladding that
was involved in previous tower fires appears to have been used on only a small
number of all buildings in the emirate - a figure he suggested could be as
little as 5 percent. But he acknowledged that officials don't know how many
buildings are at risk.
"Without (doing) the survey or something, we can't
say the number exactly," he said.
The problem is not Dubai's alone - cladding fires have
struck elsewhere in the world.
In 2010, a similar fire at a Shanghai high-rise killed at
least 58 people. An apartment fire in May in Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, killed
16. Another dramatic blaze hit Beijing's TV Cultural Center in February 2009,
killing a firefighter.
All bore similarities to the Dubai fires, with flames
racing up the sides of the building, and experts attributed each fire's speed
to the cladding.
Peter Rau, the chief officer of the Metropolitan Fire
Brigade in Melbourne, Australia, knows firsthand how dangerous such fires can
be. In November 2014, a fire erupted at a 23-story apartment building in
Melbourne and raced up more than 20 stories in just six minutes as flaming
debris rained down below. While no one was injured, the fast-moving blaze did
millions of dollars' worth of damage to the building.
In the aftermath of the blaze, fire officials discovered
some 170 other buildings in the Melbourne area had similar, flammable siding,
Rau said.
"You know you've only got to step back a little bit
further and say: 'What does it mean for Australia and what does it mean (when)
you're talking to me from Dubai?'" Rau said. "This is a significant
issue worldwide, I would suggest... There is no question this is a game
changer."
Source: Philly.com
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