WHAT COULD HAVE CAUSED THE NEW YEAR EVE'S HOTEL FIRE IN DUBAI IS A LESSON FOR ALL OF US

Courtesy: Leadership Newspapers

Courtesy: CNN

Around 9:30 on Thursday December 31 2015, a fire started in a 63-floor luxury hotel in a Dubai neighborhoods called the Address Downtown and eventually engulfed the high-end facility which housed many of the VIP tourists that came to watch the now-famous Burj Khalifa New Year Eves' fireworks display. The tragedy is now story for another day and the authorities as usual are digging into the cause. But while they are yet digging, we can dig too; can't we? So here's my take on the fire incident and what we can all learn from it for our common good:

No waste of time and space: Although Dubai Police Chief, General Khamis Mattar Al-Muzema is quoted as saying the fire likely resulted from an accident - while it was still raging on Thursday - I believe the fire was a terrorist's product. Why?

1. Dubai has attracted a global fame for many things, many of these are 'non-Muslim-looking' or 'anti-Islam' as an extremist Muslim might tag them.

2. One of these 'anti-Islam' image makers of UAE (and Dubai in particular) is tourism that tends to attract too many 'infidels' to such a Muslim domain (Doha in Qatar and Kano in Nigeria are some of the other cities committing this 'sin').

3. One of the greatest - if not the greatest - tourist attractions of UAE and of Dubai has become the New Year Eve's celebrations centered around the world's tallest building Burj Khalifa with fire-work displays. The gutted hotel is adjacent the Burj Khalifa and close to another Dubai fame making monument, the imposing Dubai Mall.

So, the neighborhoods (on New Year Eve of all times) should have been expected to be an easy terrorist target. If my suspicion is right, then the terrorists must be somewhere now celebrating their success in embarrassing not only the teeming tourists in the city of Dubai that night and the entire citizenry and authorities of UAE, but also the entire world.

I realize that terrorists usually begin to attack a target (whether a people or a place or both) little by little and, if unchecked, they tend to get to bigger things. For example, the simultaneous bombings of the United States foreign missions in Tanzania and Nairobi on August 7 1998 in which about 200 people were reported killed, happened 3 years before the simultaneous attacks on September 11 2001 targeted at the three most important US landmarks inside the US - the economic landmark, the World Trade Centre; the symbol of military might, the Pentagon and the center of policy making, the White House (which most fortunately failed). Look at the trend: from targeting TWO US properties in far away under-developed nations to targeting THREE most important landmarks inside the US!

There are many more such trends in terrorist attacks but I think the above brings it out most clearly by using the most obvious set of global examples. So now, let me apply these to the present case in point: the Dubai Hotel Fire, as I believe it will soon be known in the media world (compared to 9/11 Attacks): It should be recalled that - against what Dubai was ever known for - the city is fast becoming famous for mystery fires in her major land marks. Only in February 2015, it was widely reported in the global media that another of Dubai's high-rise edifices, the 79-floor Torch Tower - one of the world's biggest residential buildings in Marina, mostly populated by expatriates - was engulfed by fire, raising serious questions about Dubai's safety standards among world watchers, amidst the city's fast development into a major global commercial and tourist hub.

Before the February fire at the Torch Tower, it should also be recalled that a similar fire in 2012 had gutted the Tamweel Tower, a 34-floor structure in an upscale part of Dubai, the Jumeira Lakes Towers.

The Tamweel Tower fires on Sunday November 18, 2012/Courtesy: Daily Mail Online.

There are many lessons we stand to learn from all these. One of them which I consider principal, goes to hoteliers: they needed to rethink security and safety. Because hotels play host to many strangers, they could easily be used to perpetrate some of the most heinous high profile crimes such as terrorism. Hotels, and especially high-end ones, should take access control very seriously and with the aid of the latest ICT wares available. One of the highest spends in hotels yearly budgets should be on security and safety - since this, of course, should be of paramount importance to prospective customers. Customer's should demand this of the hotels they patronize. 

And this should go far beyond just access control to include top-notch intelligence gathering. Hotel owners associations of every city should come together to sponsor researches around the security and safety considerations of their respective cities. This is because, while strangers with evil intentions could be relatively easy to identify in other places than hotels - being that hotels typically house strangers - the lives of law abiding in-mates of hotels are easily put at a risk if security/safety is treated with a lower than optimum emphasis. It therefore makes no sense when a hotel would employ a half-illiterate gate man that is most ridiculously branded a 'security man'. One really wonders what sort of security man that is!

A major safety consideration by hotels, developers and all of us should concern the kind of technology we employ in building. With epochal evolution taking place in civil engineering today, hotels should be constructed in such a way that a fire occurring in one place can't easily spread to other areas. This should no longer be a story we can be hearing in the 21st Century.