The authorities blamed flammable siding for an enormous fire that tore through one of the world's tallest residential buildings on Friday in Dubai, an eerie echo of a blaze that killed at least 80 people in London in June.
No one was killed or injured in Friday's fire, the authorities said, which spread to up to 50 of the Torch Tower's 86 storeys, lighting up the sky and spewing burning debris to the streets below.
It was the second such fire at the building since 2015, when about 60 floors were burned. Investigators concluded then that the building's exterior cladding, made of aluminum panels with combustible plastic cores, helped accelerate the flames.
The blaze on Friday erupted months after the city, the most populous in the United Arab Emirates, passed additional regulations that would require buildings with flammable cladding to replace the siding with flame-retardant materials. And it occurred only weeks after a deadly conflagration at the Grenfell Tower in London, which was also blamed on flammable siding.
Cladding has contributed to at least three other skyscraper fires in recent years in Dubai. Dozens of giant apartment buildings and hotels have been erected there in the last two decades.
On New Year's Eve in 2015, a fire started by an electrical short in the Address Downtown, a 63-storey tower, quickly consumed the entire building.
After that fire, Dubai Civil Defense announced restrictions on using exterior paneling on new construction, including forbidding it on towers taller than nine floors. But the new rules did not immediately apply to older buildings.
The authorities have previously acknowledged that at least 30,000 buildings across the United Arab Emirates were built with siding that could potentially cause a fire to spread rapidly, according to news reports.
Friday's fire broke out around 1 a.m. at the 1,100-foot skyscraper, in the northern end of the densely populated Marina district.
Firefighters from four stations were deployed and helped all the residents evacuate, the Dubai Media Office, an official agency, said on Twitter.
Firefighters had the blaze under control by 3:30 am, according to the Dubai Civil Defense.
By daybreak the government said it had quenched the fire in "record time."