Virulent fire destroys 14-floor building in Valencia in less than an hour
The building, completed in 2009, incorporated a facade system consisting of an insulation material and a cladding applied by means of a substructure attached to the outer side of the wall. An air chamber between those two layers improved acoustic insulation and thermal too, thus saving energy.
The exterior enclosure was composed of a series of sandwich panels formed, in turn, by two aluminum sheets and an insulating core, which by current standards must also include flame retardants.
It has yet to be determined if the material that burned was the insulation inside those panels or the one applied directly on the wall of the ventilated facade. In any case, afternoon gusts of wind contributed to the fast spread of the flames.
The incident recalls another apartment building devastated by fire, Grenfell Tower in London. This was in June 2017 and it took the life of 72 people. It was built in the 1970s but the cladding was placed a posteriori, as part of a renovation carried out in 2015. The rest was similar: a finish of aluminum sheets with a plastic core that turned out to be highly inflammable.
