Latest Breaking News
In reply to the discussion: Fire breaks out in Dubai skyscraper [View all]matt819
(10,749 posts)I read a few weeks ago that Saudi Arabia was in the process of building a cloudscraper that's 1 kilometer high. For the metrically challenged, that's 3,280 feet (thanks Google for converting that for me). Burj al Khalifa is 500 feet shorter.
The fire reported in this post appears to be from the ground level up a bunch of stories (or from the upper level down). Pretty high, but at least they can make an effort to attack the lower stories.
How do you attack a fire that's 1 kilometer up? This link - http://www.rand.org/news/press/2012/07/30.html - observes that helicopters can drop up to 3,000 gallons of water/fire retardant on a forest fire. Can the same be used when fighting a skycraper fire?
My mother worked at the World Trade Center a gazillion years ago. I have to ask her how she felt about that? Not wrt 9/11 but about the more prosaic threat of fire. Frankly, I can't imagine living/working in a building that's over 1,000 feet, much less one that's 2,000 or 3,000 feet.