I’m interested in building design since I spend quite a lot of my life in hotels and have suffered in a few poorly-designed ones in my life. Never been in a fire but I can see the potential for fires and I’m surprised they don’t happen more often.

The fire at The Address seems to have travelled up the outside of the building, having started in a room on the 20th floor, as shown in the third photo here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3380987/Dubai-hotel-smoulders-day-fire-ripped-luxury-building-guests-reveal-people-climbed-escape-photographer-avoided-flames-dangling-hundreds-feet-air-rope.html

Watching the TV coverage you could see that rooms adjacent to the fire still had their lights on and seemed to be clear of flames and smoke, which would point to a fire that was quite well contained by the structure of the rooms and not burning inside the core of the building. That everybody got out alive down the stairs supports this. My biggest nightmare is a fire that starts in the lobby of an hotel with an open atrium design and affects every single room – the Radisson in Dubai is of this design and the Ikeja Protea in Lagos another where rooms open straight onto a massive lobby space with no protection from smoke.

In the pictures you can’t see many fire engines and in any case, nobody has a ladder tall enough to reach higher than the one pictured so how was the fire extinguished? Surely not by plucky firefighters climbing up and fighting the fire floor by floor? My guess is that once the furnishings in each room had burned out (indicated by the very orange hydrocarbon flames we saw on TV) the fire just died, unable to spread into the remainder of the structure. This would tell me that modern hotel design is pretty fireproof, as long as a fire doesn’t actually come into the room from outside the window.

Anybody else got any thoughts on this?

I think they should try not to clad hotels in flammable materials…

I don’t think the materials were flammable – look carefully at the photos and you’ll see that the cladding is damaged in the immediate area of the fire but there’s no sign of the flames having spread sideways in the outer panels.

I’ve spent more than enough time in high up hotel rooms and pondered escape a few times.

In Seoul, there was an escape kit in a bag. Basically, you break a window, slip a seatbelt type thing around you, clip a reinforced rope to a somewhat suspect looking eye bolt on the wall and lob yourself out of the window 😯

[url=https://flic.kr/p/yKutK4]Seoul 103[/url] by -Cheesyfeet-, on Flickr

[url=https://flic.kr/p/ysSJMw]14th September 2014[/url] by -Cheesyfeet-, on Flickr

[url=https://flic.kr/p/ysSDeh]Seoul 105[/url] by -Cheesyfeet-, on Flickr

open straight onto a massive lobby space with no protection from smoke.

Doesn’t a massive lobby mean that smoke and heat would be better dissipated and dispersed, giving a greater chance of escape, rather than concentrated and funnelled in a small area?

@ cheesy feet – Is that Michael Hutchences room?

like the comparisons in the comments between this fire and 9-11.

I don’t think the materials were flammable

sorry, maybe I should be more specific;

“They shouldn’t place materials on the outside of a hotel or other tall structure that will catch fire easily and spread a small fire that starts on a balcony up the whole outside of a building within minutes of the initial fire starting and before any alarm has been raised even next to the source of the fire”

The Daily Wail article mentions that the sprinklers were slow to operate and the fact that the fire got such a good hold in that room on the 20th floor would confirm this, as a sprinkler system should have extinguished a furnishings fire, surely?

If most of the building was okay would the firefighters not have used the riser to attach hoses close to the fire in the building to extinguish it along with the sprinklers?

It is amazing no one was killed, must be a good building design to keep the fire so controlled.

Well that’s what I’m hoping was the case!

Loads of tall buildings in Dubai have flammable cladding used on them. They’ve had a few fires which have spread rapidly upwards when the cladding catches fire. Piss poor local building regs.

Slightly concerned as I’m there next week in a tall hotel with work….

I’m more than a little concerned about that Korean descender device, mainly by the fact that they didn’t bother translating the 5th instruction… 😯

I’m guessing it involves something about running out of cable whilst said cable has caught fire in your room whilst you’re dangling from it 20m down on the outside of a skyscraper…

Presumably the idea with the Korean device is that you might have a chance of getting to a floor below the fire and in through a window? We had something like that when we lived in a 3-storey house in Newcastle, to enable you to escape from the attic. It was quite good fun to test.

I’ve been staying in an hotel in Kinshasa recently, which is built with the rooms around a central core, which only has a staircase at two corners of the core. Each room has a package in the cupboard with a smoke hood, which might help you to escape down a smoke-logged stairwell.

whilst you’re dangling from it 20m down on the outside of a skyscraper…

… being showered with broken glass from other escapees’ windows.

… or being twatted on the head by other rope doodahs being chucked out of windows!

Googles smoke hoods for next week…

There was a smoke hood in the room as well, well four of them actually!

In the old days before AIDS was fully understood my employer gave me an AIDS kit to carry on Africa trips. We don’t carry them nowadays but I have thought about a smoke hood. It might not protect me from smoke but it would help me evade the annoying girls who pester you in African hotel lobbies.

gave me an AIDS kit to carry on Africa trips

Isn’t that just called a pack of three?

Those controlled rate descenders are bloody brilliant.
I worked on several at the testing stage prior to EU certification.
Theres more than enough cord on that bobbin to get you to the floor on most buildings unless you’re on something where I’d have a BASE chute in my bag instead 😆

The cladding that was used was aluminium with insulation underneath it. This type of cladding was banned from usage in new buildings since 2013 due to it being highly flammable. This is what I heard from my colleague in Dubai anyway.

Those controlled rate descenders are bloody brilliant.

I remember jumping off a platform with one as part of a works training day, only the controller was on the platform and the rope looked even thinner (presumably polyprop or similar rather than nylon). Freefall for a few m until the rope took up the slack, then it barely made a dent in your speed until the spool was running out and started to spin faster at which point the fan it was connected to went woosh and it slowed you down. Felt more like landing on an over inflated bouncy castle, but preceded by a few very scary split seconds of will it/won’t it!

Allegedly it was started by a barbecue party on the balcony. Brother in law lives out there and mentioned it. We stayed with him just 300 yrds from that hotel. Hotel fire escapes seem to be very lacking out there and also fire prevention. Especially since the fire services were there very quickly, it still managed to spread far too easily.

Isn’t that just called a pack of three?

We took needle kits and all sorts when we went to Burkina Faso in the early nineties.

Not sure what advice is now, though.

Seems odd for the fire to stat on the 20th floor and spread downwards ?

Construction quality in Dubai is poor, numerous reports of other potential hazardous buildings. These high buildings have to have their own fire fighting systems as they are too large for the fire brigade to turn up with ladders etc. I’ve been visiting Dubai on business for 25 years, we always stay in low rise hotels and ideally the older ones as they are better built.

Baku also has a lot of high rise fires. I can see a regular middle east visitor might fancy one of these – http://skysaver.com/ Or just stay poor and never be able to afford to stay in a hotel.

Doesn’t a massive lobby mean that smoke and heat would be better dissipated and dispersed, giving a greater chance of escape, rather than concentrated and funnelled in a small area?

Short answer – no

Long answer – the transition from solid to gas involves expansion of ~1000 times the original volume, a decent fire will easily fill a void and with it carry heat via radiation and convection to spread the fire.

Russia has had a lot of these fires in the past as well, usually down to rubbish cladding.

Dubai though, that place terrifies me. The only place in the world I have seen fire escape doors with time delay locks that require the escapee to hold down the push bar for 15 seconds (meanwhile you have an entire airport terminal stampeding behind you).

Why don’t they just install a massive swimming pool on the top 3 floors and a plug hole in each floor below.

Why don’t they just install a massive swimming pool on the top 3 floors and a plug hole in each floor below.

I believe they do have massive water containers which can flood floor sections…

Internal sprinklers are fitted to all rooms they kept the fire from inside the rooms from entering the core areas, hopefully the pumps and water supply where strong enough and well protected to continue to fight the fire. What would have madfe a difference would have been an external drencher system, but expensive and would require a lot of water.

There have been numerous uk based fires where the cladding of high rise building has gone up and fire has spread behind the void.

also google Dubai fire station , its quite futuristic, and well equipped to fight fires, unlike what is happening to our uk fire services.

Baku also has a lot of high rise fires. I can see a regular middle east visitor might fancy one of these – http://skysaver.com/ Or just stay poor and never be able to afford to stay in a hotel

The only problem is you need a secure attachment point…

Their police have some cool vehicles too;

Also in a fiore situation its the smoke and panic that usually kils you, atrium desin buildings are built with roof vents and fans to extract smoke through the roof, or walls , along with sprinklers and fire doors and walls to protect the occupants from the effects of a spread of fire.

cbike – those packs are “clever” but if you’ve ever tried picking up an auto retractor you’ll know just how heavy one over 30mts is with a 4.5mm steel cable… let alone one of theirs at “up to 80mts”
Their site is so full of holes and lacking in info its unreal!
Apparently they use “fire resistant cable” – DUH! Steel is ….
Their specs states 11.7kgs for an 80kg device which means there’s no way the cable is above 1.5-2mm (30mts is 1.7kgs according to their maths).
It’ll never be seen in the EU as there isn’t a chance it will pass the regs necessary.
It isn’t the “first in the world” either – Latchway have had one for a number of years.

“We took needle kits and all sorts when we went to Burkina Faso in the early nineties.”

depends where we are going. But in Equatorial guinea in 2009 it was still needle kits…..same in the jungle in nigeria…

having been to the “clinic” in EG for treatment of an infected cut… i was quite glad of it seeing their needles – no EFFING WAY your sticking that in me….. and used mine…..

In nigeria(PH) i ended up in the ISOS clinic on the camp for a respiritory issue caused by dirty aircon filters…… western docs/nurses , and a nice clean clinic that sparkled…..hadto give blood – and felt happy to use their needles.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3088022/Tower-block-inferno-claims-16-lives-including-three-children-leaves-60-injured-blaze-rips-building-Azerbaijan-blamed-low-quality-materials.html

was offshore with a couple of azeri mates when this happened. They are in uproar over there as this keeps happening and the government keep cladding buildings to hide the uglyness for their expensive events they keep holding.

I believe they do have massive water containers which can flood floor sections…

yep…

[url=https://flic.kr/p/CKWA2K]Untitled[/url] by Ben Freeman, on Flickr

http://www.ife.org.uk/write/MediaUploads/2015%20Conference/presentations/Taha_Haniya.pdf

So the fire may have spread via the cladding? That would explain why it spead so fast upwards. I guess aluminium cladding will burn if it gets hot enough.

Its the insulation they glue/spray on the back of it globalti – cheap stuff has non fire retardant stuff on there which is just adding fuel to it hence the speed it propagated at.

This is a clip shown on my last fire behavour refresher- in this case the exterior cladding panels were apparently backed with polystyrene.

I heard a radio interview the other day which suggested that there had been a failure of the fire suppression system on the floor where the fire broke out in Dubai, but not sure on the source of that.

As already mentioned, firefighting in high rises is highly dependant on the integrated fire engineering – fixed suppression systems, risers, gravity tanks, protected areas etc. Some buildings will also have a “stay put” or “defend in place” policy as part of their site risk assessment, in conjunction with protected areas / refuges which means people only evacuate if they are directly affected by the fire.

http://www.highrisefirefighting.co.uk/evac.html

Okay so now I understand. In fact on Youtube there’s a video of an identical fire in Dubai last February.