Another excursion was scheduled today, where we visited the tallest building in the world. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai is an 828-meter-high building whose construction began in 2004. In a scant 6 years, this massive building with a multi-purpose purpose was constructed from the ground. Unfortunately, the excursion turned out to be a bit general so Wilco taught the civil engineering part to several students. He knew all about the movement of the building, the windows and how the building deals with shrinking and expanding due to heat and cold. The guide did know enough to tell about the basic things about this building. For example, this project cost 1.6 billion US dollars and it took approximately 20-million-man hours to complete construction in 2009. We went up to the 125th floor in 77 seconds on the world’s fastest elevator after a brief introduction on the first floor. This amounts to about 460 meters. You would think how can the 125th floor only be about half of this immense building. To break the record of tallest building, an antenna was placed on the top floor of 200 meters. However, without any other specific purpose. With this extra height, however, it is possible to see the top of the building from a distance of 95 kilometers, according to the guide. The Burj Khalifa holds another record, as it has a lounge at 581 meters, which means the highest lounge in the world. After all this information it was time to take the necessary pictures on this tower, see the pictures below to get an idea of the breathtaking view we had. After buying the souvenirs it was time to head down. Here we walked through a small museum where we could read and see some interesting information through several videos. Some interesting facts in a row. It takes 40 workers 3 months to wash the windows of the entire building. After this, they start cleaning right back at the top, to repeat it a part of the asset management process. A possible danger is fire. The building has 4 floors that are completely fireproof. Should a fire break out, people currently in the building can move to these floors to which they are fully protected from the fire for 5 hours. These floors are equipped with several elevators that can be used during a fire to evacuate the people, however, firefighters must first go up with the elevators before the people can be evacuated. The question was then asked if people could also use the stairs. The guide laughed at this and then explained that the Burj has 3,700 flights of stairs. When in normal use, the building has 65 elevators to transport about 16.7 million visitors during the year. The last fact we had never thought about before is, because the Burj Khalifa is so high, people who fast during Ramadan, they have to fast longer, since the sun high up on the tower sets later.
This was our visit to the Burj Khalifa, great new adventures await us tomorrow.