High-rise buildings along Sheikh Zayed Road were some of those to be evacuated after earthquake temblors hit Dubai last week.
As temblors shook Dubai and people fled high rises, Ben Millington found out how safe we truly are from a seismic disaster as buildings reach even further into the sky.
Hundreds of people evacuated tall buildings in Dubai last week when long range temblors from an earthquake in Iran caused structures here to shake.
Rachel Cox was on the 29th floor of the World Trade Centre at the time of the temblors and describes her fear.
If this was in Tokyo you'd have far stronger earthquakes than we did last week and people will just ignore them.
"The alarms didn't go off, everyone in the office just felt it and headed straight for the stairs," she said.
"The whole building was shaking; I saw all of the stuff on my desk moving and felt a little giddy when I stood up.
"It was quite frightening because we didn't know if it was an earthquake or if the building was crumbling."
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Rachel joined hundreds of other evacuated workers and residents waiting outside buildings across Dubai. But was this measure an overreaction? Are buildings in Dubai safe from seismic disaster?
The Dubai Municipality (DM) says "yes" - earthquakes pose no risk to the city's towers and they are in fact planning to relax earthquake building regulations next year.
They currently adhere to the internationally-used Uniform Building Code 97 (UBC) and certify all buildings over four stories to a zone 2A standard which assumes buildings can withstand local earthquakes up to 5.5 on the Richter scale.
But the DM is likely to scrap the UBC next year and replace it with a new code specific to Dubai.
"We have an outside company analysing all geological factors specific to this region to get the right parameters and formulas for our own unique code," said Moawya Safarini, head of the DM's structural engineering unit.
"When it's introduced I expect earthquake building requirements will be more relaxed because Dubai is not a seismic zone and there is no chance of having an earthquake over 5.5.
"We are actually classified as zone 0 under UBC, but we use zone 2A which makes us much more earthquake-proof than required under international standards."
While most people seem to agree that the UAE is a low-risk zone for earthquakes, the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) says caution still needs to be shown.
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