During a visit to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, I witnessed the aftermath of a tragic fire that engulfed a market area built with steel structures. The fire spread rapidly from one building to the next, destroying numerous businesses. As a structural engineer, it left a lasting impression, and it raised a question worth examining: what if those warehouses had been built in timber instead?
Considering the alternative
Would a timber-built market have burned the same way, or could the fire have been better contained? It is a counterintuitive question, because timber is often assumed to be the more flammable choice. The behaviour of structural timber in fire tells a more nuanced story, and it points towards hybrid solutions, such as timber roofs on concrete columns, that could suit the region.
There is a practical obstacle, of course. Timber resources are limited across Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East, and that scarcity has left many architects and engineers with little hands-on experience designing in timber. Closing that gap means drawing on specialists in the timber sector and fostering closer collaboration between architects, engineers, and timber experts.
How timber actually behaves in a fire
When structural timber is exposed to fire, its outer surface chars. That char layer is slow to burn and insulates the core beneath it, so a correctly sized timber member loses cross-section at a predictable rate while the inner timber retains much of its strength. This self-protecting behaviour is why heavy timber and engineered timber can keep standing well into a fire, and it is the basis of the charring design methods set out in Eurocode 5 (BS EN 1995).
Engineering note: Timber's fire performance is by design, not luck. Members are sized with a sacrificial charring allowance so the load-bearing core survives a defined fire resistance period; the structure degrades gradually rather than failing suddenly.
Why steel can struggle
Steel does not burn, but it weakens dramatically as it heats. At fire temperatures it loses strength and stiffness, which can lead to buckling, bending, twisting, and collapse, often without much warning. In a dense market of connected steel-framed units, that loss of capacity can allow failure to propagate quickly, as the Jeddah fire showed.
The availability question
Favourable fire behaviour still has to be weighed against material availability and cost. Yet here lies a telling point: most of the steel used in the region is imported. If steel can be brought in, so can timber. Importing engineered timber, or adopting hybrid structures that pair timber where it performs best with concrete or steel where those suit the loads, could deliver both resilience and efficiency without relying on local timber supply.
A pathway for the region
The Jeddah fire underlines an urgent need to explore construction methods that reduce fire risk. Timber, with its inherent and predictable fire behaviour, is a credible part of that answer once the supply question is addressed through imports or hybrid design. Informed decisions should weigh both the fire performance of materials and their availability, so the region can build more resilient, more sustainable environments.
This is exactly the kind of challenge TimbA Systems works on: bringing engineering expertise and Rothoblaas timber technology to projects exploring timber and hybrid construction. If you are weighing timber for a project in a market where it is still uncommon, we can help assess feasibility, fire strategy, and the connections that make it work.
