What Is An Expat?

One of the buildings under construction caught fire this morning. It’s two buildings away from where I work. Here’s the long range view, where we weren’t quite sure exactly which one it was yet.

A couple of shots from around the back. We couldn’t quite get me dropped off at the normal place as the roads were blocked off and some cars were actually flowing back out the wrong way.

Rubbernecking is amazing here. There were a bunch of cars literally stopped, parked in the road to watch and take pictures. If I had better presence of mind I would have taken pictures of that. Guli dropped me off at the light and I walked down the block.

I stopped and watched molten rebar and burning wood fall off the building for a while, but you can’t really see it in the pictures too well. There were a few small explosions as well as some kind of fuel had about all it was going to take.

A co-worker and I moved around to check out things from the front side. You can see where burny things have set a small area at the base of the building on fire, as well as causing a small but high grass / bush fire, which they seem content to ignore.

There were another few small explosions and the fire started up again in earnest. The top 2 floors plus the roof are probably gonna need some work.

Don’t know about anyone getting hurt or not. It was still pretty early and I don’t think there were too many workers around yet.

Here’s a couple of videos of dubious quality. Don’t ask me why they are at such wildly different resolutions. I have only a dim understanding of my PDA camera. I was disappointed not to have my nifty DSLR to get better shots. The Imate only was set to 640×480, though just now on checking it’s only half the resolution it’s capable of. DOH!

From the Satwa side
From the Sheikh Zaayed Road side

These pictures are in the Expat Gallery under Dubai 2007 also, along with a few others.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 9:34 am by Robert and is filed under Dubai. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.