The Towering Inferno, a thrilling disaster movie to keep any audience on the edge of their seats!

Released on the 14th of December 1974, the thrilling, American, disaster movie “The Towering Inferno” hit the big screen.  Starring Paul Newman as Doug Roberts, Steve McQueen as Michael O’Halloran, Faye Dunaway as Susan Franklin, Fred Astaire as Harlee Claiborne and William Holden as James Duncan, to name just a few of the celebrity cast. The plot is a simple but deadly tale of an undetected fire that breaks out on the eighty first floor of a brand-new tower block that stands 1,688 feet tall with one hundred and thirty-eight floors in total. The architect “Doug Roberts” who designed the brand-new building is on site when he is alerted to the fire and realises that substandard wiring has been used against his explicit instructions. If only the builders had listened to Doug and used Electroless Nickel Plating supplied by a company like  poeton.co.uk/standard-treatments/electroless-nickel-plating/ then the building would have been much better protected and maybe the fire would not have spread so quickly.  It was an electrical fault that originally caused the sparks that started the fire that very quickly became a red, hot inferno, burning out of control and spreading up the floors where several people became trapped.

Image credit

The developer of the building, James Duncan, is at the tower and is entertaining dignitaries, including Senator Gary Parker and doesn’t want to cause alarm, so refuses to order an evacuation even when he learns that engineer Will Giddings has been fatally injured while trying to protect a guard. Eventually when the SFFD Chief Michael O’Halloran arrives at the tower he forces Duncan to tell his guests to leave the 135th floor but some of them try to use an express lift that unfortunately becomes engulfed in flames as it descends past the eighty-first floor where the inferno is raging at its highest. An explosion then blocks the emergency stairway, and a rescue helicopter crashes into the roof setting that on fire.

Image credit

The Senator is killed alongside several others and then just as it looks likely that everybody trapped in the building will perish two of the men left alive, O’Halloran and Roberts manage to detonate plastic explosives inside water tanks on top of the tower and gallons of water surge through the burning floors extinguishing the flames. Thankfully the rest of the small group left alive manage to escape.