JEDDAH, 8 May 2006 — Queues of tankers built up round the Al-Safa water distribution center in Jeddah yesterday as the summer black market in water began. According to Abdul Rahman Muhammadi, director of water in Jeddah, a shortage of water in the storage tanks for the last 10 days is part of the problem. The other is that householders are downloading extra water from the delivery tankers.

“Many householders have fitted extra pumps,” he said, “and they are using these to take water from the tankers.”

Muhammadi said his department had no new plan to face the perennial summertime water crisis. However, he emphasized that the department would supply more water to densely populated areas.

A spokesman for the water supplier — Saline Water Conversion Corp. — denied the allegation that storage tanks had been empty for the last 10 days. “This is not true,” he said without allowing Arab News to quote him by name.

However, Muhammadi said: “We will compensate for the days when there was no supply by increasing the hours of supply when it resumes.”

The delivery side of the problem, he said, was that tankers were on a strict schedule to deliver the water to houses. Often the time allocated for downloading it is not enough to fill the tank completely. As a result, customers have fitted extra pumps to speed the download of water sufficient for their needs. This results in the tanker delivering more water in the short time allotted than they normally do. The knock-on effect of this is that the tankers have to refill more frequently, cutting down the number of customers they can visit in a day.

Jeddah is divided into 11 areas for water delivery; one day is designated for each region. If a tanker cannot complete all its scheduled delivery in one day, it moves to the next area the day following. This results in householders not lucky enough to have their tanks refilled having to wait 11 days for the next scheduled fill: Hence the black market.

Abdullah Al-Motairy, who was waiting in the long line of householders at the distribution center in Jeddah, told Arab News that there is no drinking water network in Al-Samir district, east of Makkah-Madinah Expressway, where he resides.

“We have to come here at the distribution center whenever we need water. There is no other way,” Al-Motairy said, adding that the cost of a tanker of water ranges from SR55 to SR120 depending on its size. He said he had waited at the center for three hours to order a tanker.

The problem of slow refilling of the tankers is compounded by the condition of the access road to the Al-Safa plant. Deeply rutted, the road surface has been worn completely through for much of its 800-meter length to the extent that sharp reinforcing bars protrude and threaten to tear out the sidewalls of the tires of passing tankers.

The bars are worn to a bright steely shine, indicating that they have been exposed on this hugely busy section of road for some considerable time. Private tanker owners are understandably reluctant to risk the tires — up to SR20,000 a set — on the heavily-loaded vehicles, on this entirely fixable hazard.

The consequently restricted access to the plant slows down the throughput of tankers reducing the efficiency of deliver to customers.