A building is more than just coming up with an aesthetically pleasing design, which is capable of making new records. There are a lot of factors that need to be considered by engineers while constructing a building, such as its impact on the city and how the inhabitants will cope-up with different aspects while living in it. Considering all this, one would expect that Burj Khalifa would have some amazing system to tackle the sewage, however, that is not the case here.
The skyscraper measures 828 meters when it comes to height and is not connected to a municipal wastewater treatment system. In simple words, the poop collected from the building is carried out of city via trucks. It amazes us to know that a structure as amazing as Burj Khalifa and designed with such ingenuity overlooked this system.
Burj Khalifa has 163 floors that qualify as habitable floors. It has been designed so that it is capable of catering to 35,000 persons at any given time. Considering that all these persons are well fed, the human waste (solid waste) they produce amounts up to 7,000,000 grams per day. Considering the fact that water is used to drive the solid waste through miles of piping system, we have a total of 15 tonnes of sewage per day.
According to Kate Ascher who is the author of ‘The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper’, “some [buildings] can access a municipal system but many of them actually use trucks to take the sewage out of individual buildings and then they wait on a queue to put it into a waste water treatment plant. So it’s a fairly primitive system.”
This means that sometimes the truck has to remain in queue for more than 24 hours before it gets a chance to dump the waste. It is quite shocking to see such an underdeveloped approach to sewage system in a city as modern as Dubai. Also considering the amount of money they have available along with some of the brightest minds, one would have never thought there would be no developed sewage system.
Modern middle eastern culture in a nutshell. Big show and nothing much behind it. As the oil economy crumbles these countries and cultures will too (or they will have to change dramatically)…thankfully.