09 Aug Two high rise fires in two days
Dubai’s nightime skies were lit up by flames for three hours after a large area of the 1,100 feet tall Torch Tower burst into flames for the second time inside three years.
A fast response by the Emirate’s firefighters prevented a repeat of London’s Grenfell Tower disaster in June which claimed more than 80 lives. All the Torch’s residents were evacuated with no reports of casualties.
The fire is thought to have started at 1 am on the 63rd floor of the tower which contains 676 flats and was the tallest residential building in the world when it was first built in 2011.
The blaze quickly spread across 40 floors , however, by 4 am, it had been bought under control by Civil Defence and the crowds of residents and onlooker in the streets nearby could no longer see flames.
While the cause of the fire has yet to be identified when the same skyscraper was devastated by fire in 2015 the building’s flammable cladding, which was similar to that used in the Grenfell Tower, was blamed for fuelling the blaze.
Two days after this most recent Torch Tower blaze, firefighters found themselves facing a second fire in another high rise residential block nearby.
The second incident in the Tiger Tower was believed to have started when a discarded cigarette landed on a pile of clothes that had been put out to dry in scorching heat on a 53rd floor balcony.
There were no casualties as the block was quickly evacuated and a prompt response by Dubai’s Civil Defence extinguished the flames before they spread to other floors.