Yesterday, I took the afternoon off from work to get a haircut, at a place located in the Dubai Mall. Opened in 2008, the mall is the largest in the world -- it's a beast -- and even has a three-story aquarium, with sharks and fish and occasionally live scuba divers, in the middle of it.
I arrive at one of the mall's entrances to find a busy array of firetrucks, police cars and emergency personnel outside. Sirens are still flashing, the curious and the confused linger and gawk at the commotion. Inside, they've shut off a whole wing: one of the central arteries of the mall -- the part with the aquarium, as it happens -- is dark and ghostly, its stores shuttered.
I find one of the guys from the help kiosks and ask what's going on. "Routine maintenance," he tells me. "Don't worry" -- a phrase I hear in Dubai a lot -- "it's no problem. Just routine maintenance," he says, willfully ignoring the phalanx of emergency vehicles directly behind me and facing him.
It's only later, when I reach the hair salon, that I hear what actually happened. The aquarium cracked. Or, as my Lilliputian French hairdresser put it, "Zee fish, zey try and escape!"
Now I've been in Dubai long enough to chuckle at the disparity between "routine maintenance" and "near-catastrophic engineering failure." These things happen, and when they do, those who run Dubai put out the party line and then brush their hands together, ta-da. I was certain that this incident, whatever it was, probably wouldn't get much attention in the UAE press, or if it did, it would be of the same "routine maintenance" mantra that I encountered earlier.
However, in a brilliant example of citizen journalism meeting technological availability, it turns out someone was there, camera-phone in hand, when the tank cracked. It didn't merely "crack," it split, releasing gushing tides of water (and, one imagines, an unfortunate -- or triumphant -- fish or two as well) onto the marble floor below. With such damning evidence, the national media didn't have much of a choice: the video, in all its shaky, grainy glory, was obtained and posted online by none other than Gulf News, the largest English-language newspaper in the country and a frequent cut-and-paster of press releases (er, stories) from the official state-owned news agency.
Here's the video:
I've watched it about 8 times, because I find it delightful and, like anyone prone to suspicious thinking, supremely vindicating. "Routine maintenance" my ass.
The largest mall in the world is located on Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
The aquarium is so big can accomodate mini subs to explore the aquarium!
It is still the largest mall in North America, the seventh largest mall in the world, and slightly larger than the Dubai Mall, when measured in gross leasable area. But the Dubai Mall is much, much larger when measured in total area, including areas that are not leasable, and in that category, is the largest mall in the world by far.
The Indian embassy used to keep track of how many of their citizens were dying. They stopped counting sometime last year.
Check out Johann Hari's "The Dark side of Dubai" - a brilliant article available on the Internet.
There's a lot of wealth riding on building these big projects and some structural engineering issues could, I suspect, be overlooked in the interest in getting these things into the rent generating stage.