The world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, has the world’s highest windows. Dallas joins the team whose heart-stopping job it is to clean them.
Being a window cleaner may not sound like the most exciting job-revealed in the world. Well, not until you’ve heard about what these adventurous workers have to do.
Burj Khalifa has revealed how the “window cleaning heroes” of the city scale the iconic tower to keep it shiny, and it’s definitely not for the faint of heart.
The building is cleaned four times a year, but it takes three months to complete one cleaning cycle. That means it’s being cleaned all year round.The cleaners will climb up all the way to the spire, and then descend using ropes all the way to the ground floor. Once that’s done, they’ll use the lifts to go all the way back to the top and do it all over again.
The cleaners are attached to the building using high-tension ropes to the structure so they can head outside and scale the building safely. Before that though, they have to check wind speeds. They can work safely at 20 knots (37kph), but they “stop operations outdoors” at 12 knots (22kph) so water doesn’t splash all over the place.
You can check out how the window wipers make the Burj Khalifa squeaky clean all year round in this video by BBC 1
Video courtesy of BBC