Each year more than 220 fuel trucks catch fire and millions of riyals are lost in fires that destroy the contents of hundreds of warehouses whose owners refuse to spend money on safety equipment. People continue to die in road accidents, in hotels and other public places for various reasons because many continue to ignore safety precautions. A visitor to Civil Defense offices will be greeted by lists of firefighters and emergency personnel killed while attempting to save lives and property.
Negligence remains the main cause of all kinds of industrial and other accidents. Businesses generating millions of riyals may lack the basics of safety standards. Warehouses have no system of classification with no standard design to tell what kinds of goods should be stored and where.
It is common to find wood, rubber, chemicals and other highly inflammable material all stored in the same place side by side. As if this were not enough, workers continue to live in proximity to warehouses, thereby exposing themselves to danger. In fact, I know of a major trading establishment whose general manager bought some modest firefighting equipment for one store while leaving the others, with paper and printing material, without safety equipment. In repair shops, junkyards and scrap sites, fires are almost a daily occurrence, according to the director of Civil Defense in the Eastern Province.
No one knows how long things will continue like this. If the matter is not addressed, more resources will be lost trying to repair the damage caused by fires and other accidents. And of course many of these problems could be avoided if proper safety precautions were taken. Workers’ ignorance of safety arrangements in this country is unmatched in any other country. If mandatory safety training were required of all workers as a condition for granting the iqama (residence permit), we could drastically reduce the number of industrial accidents, especially fires.
Civil Defense efforts to train female teachers how to respond to school accidents are to be commended but the department should intensify its efforts among students as well.
Just recently, a fire in Riyadh caused by workers with welding equipment resulted in losses of some SR4 million.
In a similar incident in Jeddah, a fire gutted 14 workshops after workers failed to heed repeated warnings.
In Dammam, 45 sites in different parts of the city designated as potentially dangerous have had no action taken to correct the situation.
Negligent businesses should be fined to compensate firefighting teams for the losses they incur trying to solve the problems caused by others. The fines could be used to repair damaged equipment, buy new equipment and train staff. If traders knew they had to pay for their negligence, they would try to improve safety standards in their places of business.
Arab News From the Local Press 6 July 2003
