Halton on the Dubai fire

Mr. Halton, I listened last night to the coverage as the awful fire unfolded at The Address Hotel in Dubai.

I also saw you this morning but must have missed your apology to the decision makers in that city to go ahead with their New Year’s fireworks display, as you were dead wrong with your self-righteous pontificating all evening about how terrible their decision was to proceed and how that would never happen in the States and going on and on about how irresponsible and poor their decision-making processes were, and so on. I would have respected you a bit more had you mentioned this morning that they were right and you were wrong.

Had they called off the celebration, they would have had a million people wandering the streets with many, many ending up nearby and watching the fire instead to their peril. As it was, they were safely contained behind barricades set up for watching the fireworks displays around the city, which was an excellent way of containing an already contained crowd. This would not have remained so perfectly manageable had the fireworks celebration been called off. Do you understand that? No. Instead, you were very quick to be judgmental about their decision and predicting catastrophe. You also failed to give them credit for the streets having already been cleared because of the crowd containment, which made the first responders’ job of getting to the fire much easier.