Fire is a humbling thing. At its best moments it is helpful and at its worst moments it is deadly. It is a needed tool for our everyday life, but it can go out of control so easily. No wonder it is featured so prominently in action movies, especially building fires. A building on fire puts a protagonist in a sticky situation. It induces a sense of panic in the audience, as the protagonist has to think quick about how to get out. Fires crumble a buildings structure eventually and block off many avenues of escape, so only protagonists that can think on their feet can escape, thwarting those who left them for dead to burn in the towering inferno. Real life fires are just as scary as those in the movies, and this is coming from someone who was inside his college dining hall as roof went up in flames. (I SWEAR IT WASN’T ME … HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW YOU COULDN’T TOAST A DONUT!)

Building Collapses

This video showcases what most fire fighters have to go through when there is a large inferno. You can actually see as the video goes on the support beams crumbling and melting. This is a building that needed to collapse in on itself to choke the flames, making for a very impromptu demolition. There was no way this building can be saved, and many firefighters were injured, but thankfully no one died, which is an unfortunate rarity as far as towering infernos are concerned.

Stand on the Other Side of the Bandstand!

This is an unfortunate example of a building fire that just keeps getting worse. Even though the fire fighters attempt to tackle this fire from the top down, they simply couldn’t douse the flames in time. Not to mention they only came at it from one side as the roof collapsed in on the other side. A powerful back draft causes the tower of this building and eventually a good portion of the rest of the building to collapse. The rubble and the collapse allow the firefighters to get at the fire better and eventually put it out, preventing it from spreading to other parts of the city, but the building at that point was completely gone.

The Skyscraper Fire

This building on fire was caught on tape in China, and was a rare example of every single floor of a skyscraper being alight at once. Normally when tall buildings light on fire, fire fighters do their best to contain the fire in the area in which it started. This building however simply saw the fire grow and grow and eventually consume one floor after another. This gave a whole new meaning to the words “towering inferno” as literally the fire reached all the way to the roof of the building, lighting up the night sky with its smoke and embers. An awesome and yet terrifying site.

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Man Sets Fire to Gamestop
• A Beginner’s Fire-Spinning Guide
• Doug Liman Blog: How To Light Your Producers’ Office on Fire
• The Art Of Escape – Escape From A Crumbling Building
• This Ain’t No Tilted Camera
• Cameras, Fire, and Doug Liman — 2