Business | Property
Evacuation during emergency will be a smooth process in Burj Khalifa
Structure is fully equipped with safety devices, quick response teams and has been built with innovative factors such as fireproof concrete and sills on the elevators so that water from sprinklers does not flood the shafts
- By Aya Lowe and Nadia Saleem, Staff Reporters, Gulf News
- Published: 00:00 January 5, 2010
- Image Credit: Hadrian Hernandez/Gulf News
- The tower casts its shadow over Shaikh Zayed Road as seen from the observation deck.
Dubai: The world's tallest building — featuring more than 150 available floors and expecting to hold up to 35,000 people at any one time — presents a certain risk hazard. When it comes to emergency evacuation, structure and operations is everything.
The highest-risk part of the Burj Khalifa is its high speed elevators.
To assist in the evacuation of occupants, designated elevators feature a "lifeboat evacuation" mode, allowing fire brigade personnel or trained staff to transport occupants from upper portions of the tower to designated discharge levels.
The elevators include full operating capability on both primary and emergency power, water resistant equipment, means for visual inspection of the elevator shaft and raised elevator door thresholds on each floor opening to minimise the flow of sprinkler water into the shafts.
There is also a 5,500kg capacity elevator for firefighters and building service work. For those who choose to take the stairs during evacuation, highly fire resistant concrete walls surround all stairs.
Refuge areas
"People cannot be expected to walk down 160 floors, so there are pressurised air-conditioned refuge areas, approximately every 25 floors where they could wait safely or rest on the way down," said Eric Tomich, an architect with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill the American firm that designed the building.
The areas of refuge are separated from the main structure of the building by a two-hour fire resistant construction and are pressurised to minimise the migration of smoke into the compartment.
While the Burj's design is based on a defend-in-place strategy, where the structure is geared towards isolating the problem and protecting the residents within, there is a possibility that an escalated event may require a full building evacuation.
To ensure safety, the Burj Khalifa features a home automation system which consists of LCD panels that display detailed emergency information to specified groups of building occupants. These displays can be found dotted around in key locations such as individual residential units and areas of refuge.
Multi-alarm sensors that include smoke, heat and optical sensors are located in all rooms throughout the building. In emergency situations such as during a fire, the system will immediately notify occupants in the area through an emergency voice/alarm communication system in both Arabic and English.
Fire safety systems
The main fire safety systems installed within the Burj Khalifa are the fire alarm and sprinkler systems and smoke evacuation systems. The length of the building, from basement to level 160 is fully sprinkler-fed.
On the building management and operations side, crisis response plans in place in the tower have been developed using the guidelines outlined with the National Fire Protection Association's (NFPA) disaster/emergency management and business continuity programmes and NFPA's recommended rractice for pre-incident planning.
A Crisis Command Team which also doubles up as the Facilities Management Team has been trained to manage the response efforts of building staff during a crisis.
"There will be offices located everywhere around the perimeter of the building. A team, which will be onsite 24 hours a day, seven days a week have been trained and briefed on what to do in all situations whether it's a fire, earth quake, sandstorm etc," said Bassel Mehio, fire protection consultant at Rolf Jensen and Associates.
Built for safety
The big question that arises with the tallest tower of the world is: how safe is it to be on the top and how safe is the building itself?
William Baker, chief structural engineer of the Burj Khalifa, Partner at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP (SOM), spoke to Gulf News to assure the public of the safety of the building.
"The building has a very good structure, we went through a very rigorous process. We used state of the art design tools and materials. Every thing was double-checked," Baker said.
The engineers of the tower worked the design of the structure to avoid the two major challenges; wind and gravity.
"Tall buildings are all about working with mother nature. So we try to take those things together," he said.
Baker explained that if the building were straight all the way up, the wind forces would have been much greater. When wind hits an object, it has to work its way around it. While most of the time it behaves in an unstable manner, moving from one side to another, causing the building to sway, occasionally it could be ‘organised' causing a much greater impact on the building. He said that if that occurs, the building would never have been able to gain the height that it has.
As a solution, the design of the building has a specific pattern to make it less susceptible to the forces of the wind.
"We tried to confuse the wind… by changing the shape of the building," Baker said.
While the structure of the building had withstood wind-tests, the terraces have also been designed in a way that that the wind effects are actually lower than at ground level.
The other major natural force that was used instead of being a cause for danger was gravity.
To make the building stable, a new concept of a buttress core was adopted. "We took the weight of the Burj and pushed it out and down to the wings," said Baker.
The bottom of the building is comparable to the base of a cup, he said. "A paper cup that's full of coffee is more stable than a paper cup that's empty. That's what we did with the Burj," he said.
The building has three wings and within the buttress core, the elevators are placed at the centre. "That keeps the building from twisting which is very important," he added.
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