A mistake in building planning has gone a bit too far at a Las Vegas hotel. The swanky, new Vdara hotel, is a 57 story hotel which has a curved surface. The hotel is beautiful to look at, but as one of their recent guests found out, the hotel has a fatal flaw.
Attorney, Bill Pintas was vacationing at the hotel and decided to spend some time out at the pool. While he was there, he started feeling like his head was burning. According to his interview with ABC News:
"I'm sitting there in the chair and all of the sudden my hair and the top of my head are burning. I'm rubbing my head and it felt like a chemical burn. I couldn't imagine what it could be."
Like an ant under a magnifying glass, he remembers running to an umbrella, but being unable to escape the hot light. He recalls, "I used to live in Miami and I've sat in the sun in Las Vegas 100 times. I know what a hot sun feels like and this was not it. My first inclination was thinking: Jesus we've destroyed the ozone layer because I am burning."
After he spoke with several employees who seemed to be aware of the situation, he found out that the staff of the hotel jokingly call the phenomena the “Death Ray”. It seems that the intense ray of heat is being caused by the hotel's curvy structure. The concave, reflective glass surface of the hotel gathers and concentrates the rays of the sun into a 10 x 15 foot hot zone that moves across the pool. Employees have reported that often the temperature in this hot zone can spike as high as 20 degrees more than the outside temperature. There have been reports of plastic cups getting caught in the ray and melting. For Mr. Pintas, the plastic bag he had with him was partially melted.
The hotel's management says that they are working on the problem that they refer to as a “solar convergence phenomenon”. According to their spokesperson, the problem is that it is the hotel itself causing the issue, and there is no clear way to block the sun because it is a moving target. When the hotel was constructed, it was designed and built with glass that absorbs 70% of the suns rays. Evidently, this isn't enough.
I think the lessons that we can learn from this problem is that the art of designing huge skyscrapers is still a huge challenge and even though it is done successfully most of the time, there are still many factors to take into consideration.
As for MGM, the owners of the hotel, the biggest thing to take into consideration is how hard is it going to be to sell their Las Vegas “Death Ray” hotel?
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By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.
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