00:00There have been two major fires in Sharjah in the past three months.
00:08Hundreds of families have been left homeless, they've lost all of their possessions.
00:12The fires have spread quickly, up the sides of the buildings.
00:16Is the cladding that's on those buildings safe?
00:20Does it allow fire to spread?
00:23We've come here to the Thomas Bellwright International Consultants Laboratory and we're going to
00:27carry out a somewhat unscientific test on how building cladding reacts to fire.
00:35What we have here are three tiles that are used on exterior claddings.
00:40This first one has no fire resistance whatsoever.
00:44The second has some and the third has a fire retardant ability.
00:50We have three barbecues, we're going to light the barbecues as if it were you at home in
00:53your tower in Sharjah or anywhere else and see what happens to the exterior, how easy
00:58it goes up.
00:59It's not scientific, it's merely an indicator of how these materials burn and if you can
01:04imagine an entire tower covered in these, it gives you some indication of the type of
01:09problem that we're facing.
01:11This is Thomas Bellwright, he's the CFO, Chief Technical Officer here at his laboratory.
01:16Tom, what do you expect to see here today?
01:19I expect that one of these barbecues will in fact ignite the non-fire rated or the non-fire
01:26resistant panel.
01:27It will be interesting to see what it does with the other panels.
01:49You can see here that the material at the bottom of the, the material that's between
02:05the two layers of aluminum has caught fire, whereas here it's visible that there's no
02:13difference.
02:14So it's taken a bit of coaxing and as I said this is not scientific, but you can see here
02:18where the material between the two sheets of aluminum on this tile has caught fire and
02:24it's buckling and it is feeding the fire, whereas on the flame retardant one there is
02:29no flames and on the flame resistant one there's no flames at all.
02:35But quite clearly this is a way.
02:37Tom, can you describe what would happen if this were up 40 storeys with this type of
02:43action?
02:44Well, we know what happens because we've seen it, as you say, we've seen it three times
02:51in the last six months.
02:52It takes off the heat generated and readily melts and burns the aluminum and then the
02:59core ignites and just shoots straight up the building.
03:03As you can see this one is quite clearly ablaze, the other two are not.
03:07This is the same material that was used in the Altair Tower fire last week and the one
03:14that occurred in Sharjah two months ago.
03:19Quite clearly once it gets going, now this is not a scientific test, but once it gets
03:23going it does burn and burns with ease and there's no regulations right now that require
03:29this to be banned or these to be used.
03:33I'm Mick O'Reilly, Gulf News.
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