THE DEADLY HIGH-RISES: At manufacturer's request, the U.S.'s fire safety code was weakened 5 years ago for more use of combustible panels.

A high school in Alaska, a National Football League stadium, a Baltimore high-rise hotel and a Dallas airport terminal are among thousands of structures world-wide covered in combustible-core panels similar to those that burned in June’s deadly London fire, The Wall Street Journal found.

Safety improvements to building interiors over the past 40 years have helped cut the number of structure fires and related deaths in the U.S. by roughly half, a remarkable victory over one of civilization’s oldest threats.
In promotional brochures, a U.S. company boasted of the "stunning visual effect" its shimmering aluminum panels created in an NFL stadium, an Alaskan high school and a luxury hotel along Baltimore's Inner Harbor that "soars 33 stories into the air." 

Those same panels -- Reynobond composite material with a polyethylene core -- also were used in the Grenfell Tower apartment building in London. British authorities say they're investigating whether the panels helped spread the blaze that ripped across the building's outer walls, killing at least 80 people. 

The panels, also called cladding, accentuate a building's appearance and also improve energy efficiency. But they are not recommended for use in buildings above 40 feet because they are combustible. In the wake of last month's fire at the 24-story, 220-foot-high tower in London, Arconic Inc. announced it would no longer make the product available for high-rise buildings. 

Determining which buildings might be wrapped in the material in the United States is difficult. City inspectors and building owners might not even know. In some cases, building records have been long discarded and neither the owners, operators, contractors nor architects involved could or would confirm whether the cladding was used. 

That makes it virtually impossible to know whether such structures as the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront hotel -- identified by Arconic's brochures as wrapped in Reynobond PE -- are actually clad in the same material as Grenfell Tower, which was engulfed in flames in less than five minutes.

Fire in London high-rise

At a Thursday news conference that followed the publication of The Associated Press' story on the use of the cladding material in the U.S., Cleveland's chief building official confirmed that panels on the city-owned Cleveland Browns' football stadium are "similar if not identical" to those used on the doomed London tower, but said they pose "zero risk to the fans."

Thomas Vanover said the panels were installed differently and that the venue's overall cladding includes many materials.
"From these panels and this installation, there's no risk of anything remotely close to the Grenfell tragedy," Vanover said.

The International Building Code adopted by the U.S. requires more stringent fire testing of materials used on the sides of buildings taller than 40 feet. However, states and cities can set their own rules, said Keith Nelson, senior project architect with Intertek, a worldwide fire testing organization.
The National Fire Protection Association conducts fire resistance tests on building materials to determine whether they comply with the international code. Robert Solomon, an engineer with the association, told the AP that the group's records show the U.S.-made Arconic panels never underwent the tests. For that reason, he said, the group considered the products unsafe for use in buildings higher than 40 feet.

Tests conducted by the British government after the Grenfell fire found samples of cladding material used on 75 buildings failed combustibility tests.

Solomon said the use of Reynobond PE on the Baltimore Marriott and Browns stadium in particular should be reviewed because of their height.

On buildings that are "higher than the firefighters' ladders," incombustible material must be used, Arconic advises in a fire-safety pamphlet. It warns that choosing the right product is crucial "in order to avoid the fire to spread to the whole building" and that fire can spread extremely rapidly "especially when it comes to facades and roofs."

No one has declared the U.S. buildings unsafe, nor has the U.S. government initiated any of the widespread testing of aluminum paneling that British authorities ordered after the London disaster.

Arconic declined to give further details about the buildings in the brochure, and hasn't said how many U.S. buildings contain the product.

The company is cooperating with building owners and others involved, such as the Baltimore hotel, spokesman Steven Lipin said. The product is "certified for use in the UK and US" and the company "will continue to be here to answer any questions about its products," Lipin said in a statement to the AP.
He did not indicate whether Arconic is contacting all the contractors, builders and others that used the material.

Baltimore City Housing Authority spokeswoman Tania Baker said the city doesn't keep detailed records of building materials but added that, if used, the material would have been compliant with local fire codes because the Marriott is equipped with sprinklers. Harbor East, a development company that owns the building, referred all inquiries to the Marriott, whose spokesman Jeff Flaherty said results of testing on the hotel's exterior panels could be received as early as this week.

"We can tell you that the hotel passed building inspection at the time it opened in 2001 and that the hotel's fire and life safety systems meet local code requirements," he said.

The Arconic website stated that the Browns stadium used 100,000 square feet of the bright silver aluminum composite material in its exterior.

One option for building owners who are unsure of the product's use would be to remove a section of paneling and have it tested at a lab, said Vickie Lovell, president of InterCode Inc., a consulting firm on building codes and standards.
Building records kept by cities can include construction blueprints, inspection logs and fire safety plans. But local agencies don't require that an applicant seeking a building permit submit a list of materials or specific products. In the case of the Marriott, Baltimore's housing department holds the building's original plans, which don't say what cladding was used.

The architect of record would have known what materials were used during construction. But Peter Fillat, an architect who worked on the 2001 Marriott construction, said he destroyed his records pertaining to the property six years ago because his contract requires him to keep files for only 10 years.
Construction and contracting firms that worked on the Marriott also said they no longer had those records.

For decades, the U.S. has required sprinkler systems to be installed in new high-rise buildings, as well as multiple ways for people to exit in the case of a fire. Grenfell Tower had none of those safeguards.

But fire safety experts caution that indoor sprinklers can't stop a fire that ignites on a building's exterior and spreads across the coating that encases it.
The danger is that "the whole outside of your building could be on fire, yet the internal sprinkler heads may never activate!," Oklahoma fire safety consultant John Valiulis wrote in a 2015 research report on the flammability of exterior walls. He pointed to high-rise fires that began on building exteriors where indoor sprinklers were completely ineffective at stopping flames from racing up the outside walls.

Some of the buildings Arconic lists as using Reynobond PE:

Anchorage, Alaska

South Anchorage High School used 20,000 square feet of Reynobond Aluminum Cladding Material on the exterior of its science classrooms, according to Arconic's website. Anchorage Public Schools Superintendent Deena Bishop confirmed to the AP that the material was used at the high school. "We are looking at options, studying it more, understanding what the risks are," Bishop said, adding that the cladding was installed according to code. "Presently, we're finding that the use of it on single-story buildings is appropriate according to the manufacturer."

Dallas

Arconic's website says Reynobond PE was used in Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport's 2-million-square-foot Terminal D facility, which opened in 2005. Reynobond PE formed the walls of the terminal's shopping and dining areas, the company's project report states. The panels were installed in parts of the interior and exterior of the terminal, airport spokesman Casey Norton said. "We've been aware that we have these panels for a long time and it's part of the equation that we use every time we inspect the airport for fire safety," he said.

Detroit

Arconic's website reported 26,000 feet of the paneling was used in six Early Childhood Development Centers for the Detroit Public School System. Detroit Fire Marshal Gregory Turner said no specific buildings had been identified using the material applied to Grenfell Tower but that the city was continuing to investigate.

Denver

The top two floors of 1899 Wynkoop, a nine-story office and retail building in downtown Denver's historic warehouse district, were clad with the product to lighten its appearance and keep it from dominating the surrounding warehouses, Arconic advertises in promotional materials. About 13,000 square feet of Reynobond PE was used, the company said. Officials in Denver's community planning and development office have been looking into the matter, but haven't been able to locate the original building plans. "Our expectation is that it was purged as part of our normal records retention process," spokeswoman Andrea Burns said in an email.

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How a common building material turned a Dubai hotel fire into an inferno

Experts say they have no idea how many skyscrapers around the world have a potentially combustible panelling making them at risk of similar fast-moving fires.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES—Within minutes, the revelry of New Year’s Eve in Dubai turned to horror as those gathered for fireworks downtown watched flames race up the side of one of the glistening city’s most prominent luxury hotels.

But the fire at the 63-storey The Address Downtown Dubai wasn’t the first, second or even third blaze to spread swiftly along the exterior of skyscrapers that have risen from the desert at a torrid pace in and around Dubai over the past two decades.

It was at least the eighth such fire in the Emirates alone, and similar blazes have struck major cities across the world, killing dozens of people, according to an Associated Press survey.


The reason, building and safety experts say, is the material used for the buildings’ sidings, called aluminum composite panel cladding. While types of cladding can be made with fire-resistant material, experts say those that have caught fire in Dubai and elsewhere weren’t designed to meet stricter safety standards and often were put onto buildings without any breaks to slow or halt a possible blaze.

While new regulations are now in place for construction in Dubai and other cities, experts acknowledge they have no idea how many skyscrapers have the potentially combustible panelling and are at risk of similar fast-moving fires.

“It’s like a wildfire going up the sides of the building,” said Thom Bohlen, chief technical officer at the Middle East Center for Sustainable Development in Dubai. “It’s very difficult to control and it’s very fast. It happens extremely fast.”
The Address Downtown hotel after it was gutted by the New Year's Eve blaze.




Cladding came into vogue over a decade ago, as Dubai’s building boom was well underway. Developers use it because it offers a modern finish to buildings, allows dust to wash off during rains, and is relatively simple and cheap to install.

Dubai has since burgeoned into a cosmopolitan business hub of more than two million people. As in other Emirati cities, foreign residents far outnumber the local population. Expatriate professionals in particular are drawn to the ear-popping apartments the city’s hundreds of highrises offer, and skyscraper hotels accommodate millions of guests each year. The city-state aims to attract 20 million visitors annually by the time it hosts the World Expo in 2020.

That means the risk of highrise fires touches people from all over the world.

Typically, the cladding is a half-millimeter thick piece of aluminum attached to a foam core that is sandwiched to another similar skin. The panels are then affixed to the side of a building, one piece after another.

The biggest problem lies with panel cores that are all or mostly polyethylene, a common type of plastic, said Andy Dean, the Mideast head of facades at the engineering consultancy WSP Global.

“The ones with 100-per cent polyethylene core can burn quite readily,” Dean said. “Some of the older, even fire-rated, materials still have quite a lot of polymer in them.”

The panels themselves don’t spark the fires, and the risks can be lessened if they are installed with breaks between them to curb a fire’s spread. The panels’ flammability can be significantly reduced by replacing some of the plastic inside the panels with material that doesn’t burn so easily.

However, when installed uninterrupted row after row, more flammable types of cladding provide a straight line of kindling up the side of a tower.
A skyscraper burns in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, on Oct. 1, 2015. Local experts have suggested as many as 70 per cent of the towers in Dubai may contain the flammable material.


That was the case in 2012 when a spate of fires struck Dubai and the neighbouring emirate of Sharjah. Blaze after blaze, though some ignited differently, behaved the same way: fire rushed up and down the sides of the buildings, fuelled by the external panels.

The day after an April 2012 fire at a 40-story building in Sharjah, Dubai issued new building regulations barring the use of cladding constructed with flammable material. Officials elsewhere in the United Arab Emirates followed suit, though by that time, the building boom had subsided in the wake of a global recession.

But the rules did not call for retrofitting buildings with flammable cladding already installed — nor is there any clear idea of how many of these buildings stand in Dubai or the UAE’s other six emirates.

Local experts have suggested as many as 70 per cent of the towers in Dubai may contain the material, though they acknowledge the figure is only an estimate as there are apparently no official records.

“There’s an exposure because there’s a lot of them and unfortunately they don’t come with an ‘X’ on the building to know which ones they are,” said Sami Sayegh, global property executive in the Middle East and North Africa for insurance giant American International Group, Inc.

Emaar Properties, which developed The Address Downtown and nearby properties including the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, said authorities are still investigating the New Year’s Eve fire. It has hired an outside contractor to assess and restore the damaged tower, and it plans to reopen the hotel, based on orders from Dubai’s ruler himself. It has not released specific details about the type of cladding used.

However, The National, a state-owned newspaper in Abu Dhabi, has reported that the cladding used on The Address Downtown was the fire-prone type seen in other blazes.
The Tamweel residential tower at Jumeirah Lakes Towers in Dubai burns in this Nov. 18, 2012 file photo.

Lt. Col. Jamal Ahmed Ibrahim, director of preventive safety for Dubai Civil Defence, said authorities take the issue of cladding fires seriously and are committed to “finding solutions and stopping these accidents from happening.”

A nationwide survey of existing buildings has been ordered in the wake of The Address fire, and additional guidelines will be put in place in March to ensure new buildings are constructed to a higher standard, he said.

However, Ibrahim insisted that the type of cladding that was involved in previous tower fires appears to have been used on only a small number of all buildings in the emirate — a figure he suggested could be as little as 5 per cent. But he acknowledged that officials don’t know how many buildings are at risk.

“Without (doing) the survey or something, we can’t say the number exactly,” he said.

The problem is not Dubai’s alone — cladding fires have struck elsewhere in the world.

In 2010, a similar fire at a Shanghai highrise killed at least 58 people. An apartment fire in May in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, killed 16. Another dramatic blaze hit Beijing’s TV Cultural Center in February 2009, killing a firefighter.

All bore similarities to the Dubai fires, with flames racing up the sides of the building, and experts attributed each fire’s speed to the cladding.

Peter Rau, the chief officer of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade in Melbourne, Australia, knows firsthand how dangerous such fires can be. In November 2014, a fire erupted at a 23-story apartment building in Melbourne and raced up more than 20 stories in just six minutes as flaming debris rained down below. While no one was injured, the fast-moving blaze did millions of dollars’ worth of damage to the building.

In the aftermath of the blaze, fire officials discovered some 50 other buildings in the city — and 1,700 in the surrounding state of Victoria — had similar, flammable siding, Rau said.

“You know you’ve only got to step back a little bit further and say: ‘What does it mean for Australia and what does it mean (when) you’re talking to me from Dubai?’” Rau said. “This is a significant issue worldwide, I would suggest ... There is no question this is a game changer.”