The summer tourism season is in full swing in the Eastern Province.
Nightly entertainment at the shopping malls, crowds at the amusement parks and packed beach fronts all attest to the fact that the Eastern Region is a popular destination for local tourists.
The Tourism Development Council, the Supreme Commission for Tourism and the Eastern Province Chamber of Commerce and Industry have all put forward plans to provide entertainment and recreation to a wide range of visitors coming to Alkhobar, Dammam, Jubail and Al-Ahsa from around the Kingdom.
But just two weeks into the summer festival, the Alkhobar seaside is already showing signs of fatigue. The government has spent years and tens of millions developing the Corniche, which is why the deterioration and in some instances the outright abuse of the facilities in this area are a serious concern.
Walking along the Alkhobar seaside at two o’clock any morning, one would think that the area had been the venue for a riot. The grassy hills and banks are littered with items from food wrappers to dirty diapers. This is despite the placement of trash cans every few meters.
The public restrooms are a health hazard; filthy in horrible ways. Graffiti creates eyesores of what only hours earlier were recently painted walls and brand new benches. Broken light poles, abandoned charcoal fires and damaged playground equipment add to the atmosphere of wanton destruction.
Come back at noon and the area is nearly deserted except for the contracted crews attempting to create order out of chaos. One group spends the entire day picking up garbage. For another janitorial team, mucking out the public restrooms is their hideous daily duty. These men do amazingly good work with this thankless task. The bathrooms are clean and dry when they finish, although there’s nothing they can do to repair the abused toilet fixtures and the spray paint is impossible to completely remove from the restroom walls.
Not all the damage to the Alkhobar Corniche is due to vandalism.
Weather of course has some affect. Crumbling concrete and steel reinforced benches are rusting, tetanus traps lurking near playgrounds to hurt small children. These should have been torn out and removed long ago. The grass on the Corniche is irrigated with automatic sprinklers, but in many areas the sprinklers have gone mad and are spraying water on the sidewalks, decorative pillars, tree trunks — almost anywhere but the grass.
With the sprinklers switching on just before noon, the combination of water under pressure and high heat is stripping and cracking surrounding surfaces.
Poorly installed recreation equipment is a problem, too. Sad to see is a recently equipped playground that is falling to pieces. The special, soft tile used as a state-of-the-art ground cover, instead of sand in the playground, is separating from the rocky soil underneath creating a safety hazard.
“We cannot let our youngest daughter play here because if she tripped and fell, or she fell off the swing, she would fracture her skull or break a bone,” said Analisa Diego, a mother of three. “The tile is cleaner than sand, and my older daughters prefer it, but it’s not safe for the little ones.”
At that same playground, rusty bolts were holding the playground equipment in place and one of the swings had been repaired with rusty wire. This playground wouldn’t meet the child safety standards in any developed country.
The foreman for the janitorial crews stated that they are only contracted for clean-up in the area and not facility or equipment repair. A team working to fix a wall near the seaside, claimed to be only responsible for the wall and nothing else. After being referred from office to office at the municipality for two days, no one there has a ready answer as to which contractor is responsible for repairs to the Corniche facilities.
It seems essential that before any more funds are invested in improvements in the Alkhobar Seaside that security needs to be tightened, perhaps through the use of CCTV or even police officers on foot patrol. Contractors, who were paid to do work that in just a few months is falling apart, must be held accountable by the municipality.
Public awareness campaigns for good citizenship should be launched alongside domestic tourism campaigns.
Developing the local tourism industry is a great strategy but it can’t be done effectively when the method for progress is one step forward, followed by two steps back.