Remaining Life of a Building under Fire - The Towering Inferno (1974)

A Clip from a movie "The Towering Inferno" (1974) The story revolves around a fire disaster (due to poor wiring) during the premier party in the world's tallest skyscraper catches fire . A determined fire chief and an honourable architect fight the fire from the outside and the inside, respectively. The fire perpetuates and creates a serious threat to lives of people inside building while the owner struggles to find ways for rescuing the trapped guests. This particular scene shows a Structural Engineer working on his calculations to determine how much time the building structure can sustain before complete failure. The solution comes out to be around 15 - 20 minutes, which by no means was enough to rescue all guests. He proposes a possible solution by exploding the building's water tanks on the roof, as they hold one million gallons of water, which is enough to extinguish the fire. He worked out the remaining structural capacity and concluded that underlying assembly can withstand with the impact caused by exploding the tanks. As it seem that blowing the tanks is the last hope, this option, however, may kill the remaining partiers trapped on the Tower. ... and the suspense continues.