Up in smoke: Flammable cladding on UAE buildings

Gulf News

Up in smoke: Flammable cladding on UAE buildings. Gulf News conducts a non-scientific burn test on three cladding tile samples used on the exterior of many buildings in the UAE to find out whether or not they are fire resistant. See more at: http://gulfnews.com/gntv

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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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