Halton on the Dubai fire
Mr. Halton, I listened last night to the coverage as the awful fire unfolded at The Address Hotel in Dubai.
I also saw you this morning but must have missed your apology to the decision makers in that city to go ahead with their New Year’s fireworks display, as you were dead wrong with your self-righteous pontificating all evening about how terrible their decision was to proceed and how that would never happen in the States and going on and on about how irresponsible and poor their decision-making processes were, and so on. I would have respected you a bit more had you mentioned this morning that they were right and you were wrong.
Had they called off the celebration, they would have had a million people wandering the streets with many, many ending up nearby and watching the fire instead to their peril. As it was, they were safely contained behind barricades set up for watching the fireworks displays around the city, which was an excellent way of containing an already contained crowd. This would not have remained so perfectly manageable had the fireworks celebration been called off. Do you understand that? No. Instead, you were very quick to be judgmental about their decision and predicting catastrophe. You also failed to give them credit for the streets having already been cleared because of the crowd containment, which made the first responders’ job of getting to the fire much easier.
Even this morning, instead of giving credit where credit was due, you made lame excuses about how “people must have been awake anyway to watch the New Year celebration and thus there were no fatalities.” Wow! Instead, you go on with a little speech about how “here in the States” we don’t allow combustible vapor barriers like they do over there. I’m not positive, but I believe that is an untrue statement.
Next time you’re on MSNBC, you really should say “in hindsight”; you were not correct about being so derogatory and judgmental about the decisions made in Dubai last night and, maybe, stop embarrassing yourself. Such statements as, “We’ve seen a lot of these types of fires over there,” when, in fact, you could only cite TWO also undermine your credibility!
Name Withheld
Bobby Halton responds: First, allow me to say thank you for taking the time to write to me and express your concerns over my opinions I voiced on MSNBC. While we clearly disagree over whether or not the authorities should’ve continued with their fireworks display, I see you have an excellent point regarding the crowd control. I must admit I had not considered the fact that the crowd may have been drawn to the fire in the absence of a display, which you expressed in your note. Crowd control was never one of the subjects that the fire service has been intimately involved in, as we generally leave that up to our counterparts in law enforcement. Also, I was not privy to any of the information about how well the crowd was controlled prior to the arrival of the firefighting forces, which, apparently, you were. I did compliment several times the civil defense forces there, among whom I have many friends and colleagues.
In the few seconds the media give us to express a thought, we are not always able to expand and give much background, but allow me here to attempt to assuage some of your distress. I based my opinion on my 40-plus years of experience as a firefighter and command officer in the fire service and having studied many fires throughout my career. I did not predict that there was going to be a catastrophic event, and I apologize if you inferred that from my remarks, but I did opine on the fact that the probability of a secondary event would be of great concern to me if I was in command of the firefighting forces in this event.
Also, I did not have time to go through the list of all the historical fires related to flammable exterior components, but I have included a few links for you and the readers to look at so that you can see what I based that opinion on. The first link is to an article we published in Fire Engineering in 2015 [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705813012940] so that you can see that flammable exterior components are a point of concern and you can see a history of some of those fires related to flammable exterior components.
I’m sure that you heard my good friend FDNY Deputy Chief (Ret.) Vincent Dunn disagree with me on MSNBC about the continuation of the fireworks and his position that they should go on as planned. I hold Chief Dunn in the highest regard, and we respectfully disagreed with one another regarding whether we would have encouraged our superiors to continue with the fireworks. Chief Dunn based his opinion on the necessity to continue on in spite of terroristic threats. The chief did not have your insight as to crowd control, which is, again, an excellent insight. Even given your point, I must say that I would be very concerned about my staffing issues, redeploying critical forces, and other command-and-control issues that would have weighed heavily on me as the incident commander, were I in charge. That is the mindset I had while I was discussing the possibilities of the fireworks continuing or not continuing.
Also, I must admit that my opinion on fireworks is somewhat prejudiced, as I have had the misfortune of having responded to several major catastrophic fires caused by fireworks failures. I hope you can understand that my perspective has always been on public safety and putting the safety of others first. As firefighters and fire command officers, we always try to minimize the amount of exposure that citizens and firefighters get at all costs.
I hope these links provide you with some understanding of the concerns that we have in the fire service about the combustibility of some of these exterior finishings and the history that we have with fires related to this concern. We’re particularly concerned that several American cities are starting to allow the use of these materials when they have been prohibited by code for the past 60 years. I hope that we can continue to agree and disagree from time to time in a way that is productive and insightful. I find the exchange of opinions to be educational and enlightening. I appreciate your insight.
Name Withheld responds: Thanks for bothering to answer me. I appreciate it. I apologize for leaving off my name. I didn’t mean to send an anonymous note but hit the send button too fast, as I was aggravated with the coverage.
My disagreement was not so much with your opinion-you have much more experience than I do with regard to these issues! It was with the self-righteous attitude with which you stated them and, intended or not (probably not), they came across as if it was a horrible decision and would never be allowed “here in the States” and the implication was that bad things would happen as a result. Absent any of your (very valid) concerns, it implied that if they didn’t call off the “show,” it would result in a catastrophe. It sounded as though that was the reason you felt they made a bad decision.
Hindsight is terrific, I know, but you might have said without knowing their staffing strength and capabilities that you may have decided to cancel the show unless they had enough standby personnel to tackle another disaster simultaneously. Even the following morning, you (seemed like grudgingly) attributed the incredible and impressive lack of injuries to the simple assumption that “people were probably awake anyway to watch the festivities and were thus lucky to get out.” That statement is patently not true, in my opinion.
Yes, I heard Chief Dunn and was surprised at how wrong he was about his diagnosis (halfway around the world) of the fire being an “interior fire.” I am not proud of the note that I wrote him, but I called him out with a note as well.
I may be wrong and wish I were, but I think these “fire sandwiches” (I used to call them) have been around and allowed for a very long time. I remember the popularity of insulated sandwich panels such as ALUCOBOND being very popular in the ’70s. The slick aluminum skins that sandwiched nothing more than petrochemicals like polystyrene and other plastic and rubber-like vapor barriers allowed our buildings to be clad with fuel for fires just waiting for an opportunity. On this we certainly agree. We decided as a society to stop using real building materials like brick and stone and marble with which to clad our buildings. I used to feel like firefighters and building departments should push for exterior fire suppression sprinklers, too, if they were going to allow these combustible claddings! As I said to Chief Dunn, I think from what I saw on TV it will be shown that the fire was an exterior fire, which is why it burned vertically so quickly and not horizontally (except where it started). At the end of the day, I think they did an amazing job of putting out an exterior fire from the inside and rarely have seen such an impressive effort, even in “the States.”
Now that we have beaten this dead horse to death, thanks again for bothering to answer this (also retired) old architect!
Fire Engineering Archives