Holy Moses…. This is wild…:
Via the New York Times:
A fierce fire engulfed one of the Chinese capital’s most architecturally celebrated modern buildings on Monday, the last day of festivities for the lunar new year when the city was ablaze with fireworks. By late evening the blaze was still raging and the cause remained unknown, but it seemed clear that the 34-story structure, not yet completed, had been rendered unusable. The building, a luxury hotel and cultural complex designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, is part of China Central Television’s new headquarters, an angular two-legged behemoth built to coincide with the Beijing Olympics last year.
Firefighters, their ladders only reaching up a dozen or so floors, could do little to contain the blaze, a spectacular wall of flames eerily reflected in the glass skin of the adjacent CCTV tower.
The CCTV complex was a hugely expensive trophy of the pre-Olympics building boom, the result of many billions of dollars that the ruling Communist Party had devoted to making Beijing a city of the future. The main CCTV tower appeared untouched by the fire.
The 241-room Mandarin Oriental hotel, which had been due to open this summer, was unoccupied at the time, hotel executives said.
According to Chinese television, the fire began at 8:27 p.m., although witnesses said they spotted flames as early as 7:45 p.m. Within 20 minutes, they said, the fire had spread from the lower floors to the building’s crown. Black smoke drifted across the night sky, obliterating a full moon.
The authorities blocked off a thoroughfare known as the Third Ring Road, which runs adjacent to the complex. Subway cars running underneath the site were briefly halted, stranding thousands of passengers. Frantic police officers tried to shoo away huge crowds as sirens wailed and fireworks lit up the skyline. People watching noted that the timing of the fire — coming at the end of the spring festival — was inauspicious.
While errant fireworks were suspected as a possible cause, fires of such magnitude are nonetheless highly unusual in Beijing.
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Of course, the Alex Jones crowd is trying to compare it to WTC-7. Proving that you cannot fix stupid. What happened at WTC-7 was that airlines destroyed the Twin Towers and the falling debris from the towers damaged key structural members and the resulting uncontrolled fires led to the collapse hours after the rest of the complex. Anyone who says otherwise is insulting the dead. Which is something Alex Jones is good at. 🙄
Why can’t people just accept the damned truth and be glad they even got it. Damned morons. 😡