2/20/2005: Madrid building fire

Last Sunday one of Madrid's largest buildings suffered a huge and amazing fire and was destroyed. The images from it are remarkable.

Lurker mundofer, who was also the first to suggest some images from the terrorist attack there last year, suggested a set from this event. (Thank you!) Luckily, there were NO fatalities in this fire, and it was not a terrorist event, just a simple short circuit.





Several very striking photo albums here, here,
here and here.

Mundofer also notes: "Though the fire ran from top to bottom, the cement core didn't went down and they must destroy it in a step by step process. They cant do it with a controlled explosion because there are three metro lines and one train line in the underground and the falling of the building would destroy them."

Amazing fotos !!! I read some where that it is to dangerous to have workers go into the remaining burned out building , so they were talking about useing some kind of destructo-bot hung from cranes or helocopters . Every body look around and see if you can dig up any pics of these destructo-bots.

Great Pictures!! Thanks for sharing.

Thanks also to everyone for all of the pictures :thumbsup: and also for the funny comments. I recently found this site & have been going thru the archives. Often I am laughing at all the great comments.

Sandra77

WOW! Now that's a fire........ Amazing how there was so much destruction to property and no lives lost.
I can't help but wonder if the outcome would have been different had the fire started on the lower part of the structure.
Smores, anyone? :idea:

Those are some great pics!
I heard marshmellow companies made a lot of profit that that day. Mmm, melted marshmellows...

zippyt wrote:

Every body look around and see if you can dig up any pics of these destructo-bots.

As a local I have easy access to photographs. I will keep you informed if someone with the bots come in.

capnhowdy wrote:

I can't help but wonder if the outcome would have been different had the fire started on the lower part of the structure.
Smores, anyone? :idea:

They say the main problem is that the security services of the building wait too much time trying to stop the fire themselves and didn't call the firefighters. When this came it the fire was so huge that couldn't go in and simply wait for the fire to extingish itself.
The building was the spanish office of the consultancy Deloitte (20 floors) and now they have... uh... some logistics problems (they say that the have an off the building backup of their servers from the thursday, but I can only think in all the things that were not in the servers).

Was it under construction or is that crane on a different building? :confused:

Oh...and welcome to the Cellar, Sandy. :)

[QUOTE=xoxoxoBruce]Was it under construction or is that crane on a different building? :confused:

the crane is in top of the building. They were refurbishing it because it was old (from 1973) and they were washing it up.

One of the threats of the fire was that the crane could have fallen. Fortunatelly it didn't. :rollanim: