Originally Posted by
atakacs
Well most of the facades remained fire free before being eventually engulfed.
Agreed.
Footage around 3 AM shows that it took at least one hour before all sides of the Building were engulfed. So there would have been a time window of roughly one hour.
In my humble opinion that was definitely opportunity for some aerial rescue.
The question would have been how to extract the people from the building?
Would not have been easy with a helicopter since there were no balconies or other platforms from where to extract. Extracting from open Windows would have been very difficult and risky. And all that at night over a heavily burning building. I'm not sure if that would been really possible.
The problem is that the initial response was to "stay in" and when the firefighters realized how terrible that option was they pretty much watched people die before their very eyes left, right and center. Just terrible.
That must be absolutely horrible. Staying put in this case unfortunately meant certain death. In hindsight.
A few might have survived had they tried to flee through the staircase or even the elevator (which is normally not a good idea in a burning building).
A big and high building with only one rather small staircase, no other emergency exits, no sprinklers is really a death trap and if this wasn't enough on top of all this an easily flammable Insulation. I wonder how this can be legal. Someone should really go to jail for allowing this. If I were living in a high rise building I would check my housing immediately for similar traits and leave ASAP if I were to find more than one similar aspect.
The initial cause of the fire is an almost irrelevant minute detail to this tragedy. In such a big building there is always a possibility that a fire might break out. But that shall never, ever spread like in this horrible case.
Honestly, I wouldn't have thought this to be possible in a first world Country.