Building Dubai

Fourty years ago, most of the piece of land so called today "Dubai" was simply a burren desert. Now there is a glittering metropolis, the fastest desert city growing on the planet. Building a city like that in the most inhospitable places on Earth seems impossible. Dubai's 2 million citizens don't have to worry about the tremendous heat and it's basically all technology that keeps the whole city alive. The city's most techno marvel is Burj Khalifa which is half a mile high almost twice as tall as the Epire State building. It is the tallest skyscraper in the world. Up to 32000 people can work and live in that gigantic green house. But what exactly stops them from being roasted alive? The short answer: water.
200 gallons of water a day for that particular building alone. Finding too much water in one of driest place on Earth was a huge challenge when the building boom began 40 years ago. There are no rivers in the city and hardly any rain, yet Dubai is a wash with water coming from the rocks underneath the city which forms a reserve for thousands of years ahead. That ancient water dating from more than 6 million years promotes Dubai's spectacular growth. That water is pumped up to very tall resedential and business structures all over the city with a unique awesomely engineered watering system to make the inhabitants happy. The city has more than 200 skyscrapers and they are incredibly thirsty. Their glass skin can seal thousands of miles of pipes sucking millions of gallons of water a minute frompipes burried deep under the sand shielded from the scorching heat. Water is at the heart of everything in Dubai and the city's engineers have mastered it.
Chiek Zayed Road is the most impressive street in the Middle East. It is crowded with more than 50 skyscrapers and each tower weighs up to a quarter of a million tons. But all around and below then hidden under the streets and side walks is soft desert sand. Thus, the big challenge is to stop these structures from toppling over and the city engineers has solved that with solid foundations on solid rocks to rest on. Those rocks were brought from the Hajjar moutains 40 miles east of Dubai. Those rocks are 24 million years old and they were ,according to geologists, an ocean floor. To reach the rocks, construction workers have to dig more than 150 feet of sand to reach the rocky terrain on which they intend to build their solid foundations.