STJ911 Blog

Beijing Hotel Tower Fire (2009)

What can be learned about the behavior of tall buildings on fire from the ?

While exist of buildings structurally similar to the WTC Towers having withstood similar or larger fires for longer, the CCTV Headquarters building was highly unique in both design and structure, and did involved some amount of concrete reinforcement of the structural steel.

Importantly, however, no part of the CCTV hotel building collapsed from the fire, which was reported to have lasted from between 3-6 hours.  And unlike the WTC Towers, in which the vast majority of each Tower was at all, the CCTV Hotel Tower was entirely engulfed in flames from top to bottom.

Fire images are here –

After the fire images are here —

Building conceptual images –

Engineering firm, East Asia

CCTV Headquarters, Beijing, China: Building the structure – Engineering firm, East Asia
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