Grasping the edge of a balcony 48 stories from the ground, just meters away from a raging fire, the photographer thought he might not live to see this year.
“One hour, then that’s it, I’m dead,” he thought as he stood on the tiny sill of a balcony in Dubai’s luxury The Address Downtown hotel, attached by a rope to a massive window-cleaning platform.
Not long before, he had entered the balcony with a friend to take photographs of the nearby New Year’s Eve fireworks display for his newspaper, but the night suddenly changed when a huge fire erupted in the hotel below, engulfing several floors of the huge building in the heart of the skyscraper city.
Photo: EPA
“There’s a fire,” his friend shouted, rushing toward the nearest exit, before the photographer looked out and saw “smoke coming toward the balcony.”
Afraid that he would die from suffocation, and unable to see how he could escape, the photographer decided there was only one thing for it — to tie a rope from himself to a window-cleaning platform and hang off the balcony.
He rolled out 30m of a heavy-duty cable from a nearby machine used by workers to clean the tower’s windows, attached it to his belt and photographic equipment, and stepped off the edge.
The rope “was my savior”, he said, asking not to be named and explaining that the fire was less than 10m away from him at that point.
He feared he would die from suffocation, he said.
“I wasn’t sure what was happening downstairs. I was afraid I might collapse from the smoke,” he said.
Holding on for dear life outside the building, he began calling and texting his colleagues asking them to get in touch with civil defense officials for help.
Civil defense representatives kept him calm as he waited to be rescued.
“I was telling them I hoped to survive and see my wife,” he said.
More than half an hour later, he heard rescue workers approaching his floor.
“When I saw lights and heard the sounds of footsteps at the floor I was in, I started tapping on the aluminum to get their attention,” he said.
“I think I was the only person left stuck that long,” he said, describing how he was led out through the smoke-filled corridors of the five-star hotel.
Dubai’s police chief said that all the residents had been evacuated due to the blaze, the cause of which was unknown.
Not far away, Dubai’s fireworks display erupted as usual to welcome in the New Year, starting from the Burj Khalifa — the world’s tallest building — before spreading across the skies above the city.
For the photographer, the start of the year was something he would never forget.
“I’m excited because it’s New Year, and [filled with] an adrenaline rush,” he said, his voice still shaky.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS