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New, 44-Story Skyscraper in Beijing, China, Burns

New, 44-Story Skyscraper in Beijing, China, Burns How Does a New, 44-Story Skyscraper Burn in a Matter of Minutes If it is Not Built of Crap? Lex LoebContributor Network . Just a dose of reality here. This 44 story building in Beijing, China that burned all 44 stories in a matter of minutes was no paradigm of construction nor was it a safe building to begin with. This building hopefully would never have passed any US city code. Apparently it had no sprinkler system and was built with way too much combustible material. Another fine point to mention against the 911 comparison is that no plane full of combustible kerosene hit this building for it to burn this much. If this was an arson attack then the building owner would had to pump fuel up to the roof using the water pipes. This was a building that was built of different materials than the WTC . It maybe a reinforced concrete building and not a steel structure where the asbestos fire proof insulation had been removed as per the WTC. It also did not have the exposure to the same high temperature fire that all the kerosene from the jet liners despited in the central core of the WTC for a hotter fire. This fire is seen racing though this building much faster than it did in the WTC. The WTC did not all catch fire and spread it to every floor. What the Beijing fire shows is that the nice looking brand new skyscrapers of China are dangerous death traps probably because of a number of corners being cut just like the melamine milk scandal there. The Chinese builders must have substituted cheap combustible materials or plastics or not bothered to put in a functioning sprinkler systems and fire barriers between levels and zones as are required in US skyscrapers of the same size and height. This building that burned down was not nearly as well built as the WTC and equal test would be to have seen a plane flown into it and not just a small fire consume the whole tower. You will recall that the WTC survived the first terror attack where there was fire in the parking lot basement. Smoke did damage in the first attack but the building did not go up in flames. After seeing this fire in Beijing I would be scared to spend any length of time in any building like it in China because clearly it looks like a safe American tower but it is something entirely otherwise. The Chinese are in a hurry to make themselves look more successful than they are and this building whose office space would be rated triple A for rents was not even safe enough for any occupancy to begin with once you see a fire spread the way it did there. Had this building been fully occupied at the time of the fire it could have been a death trap that exceeded 911 on a population per floor basis with no terrorist act and no jet fuel laden plane crash into it's core. This is not to say the US does not have buildings just as dangerous in some instances. China has rushed to build 1980s of high rises in recent years and this is a red flag that construction methods maybe defective. A fire like this one that races though all 44 floors is a wake up call for those interested in renting office space in triple A office buildings in China to reconsider. Other data does show that high rises in China have survived major earth quakes better than low lying older building that were improperly reinforced to resist quakes. Google key words: china , skyscraper, fire , February 2009 to see the video of how this thing burned and knock off the 911 comparisons because the Chinese fire is not a building that suffered anything like the same sort of structural trauma the WTC towers did. .

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