JEDDAH, 21 March — Most of the injured students transferred to King Khaled National Guard hospital in Jeddah after the Makkah school tragedy are continuing to receive treatment there, and one of them is still in the intensive care unit at the hospital.
However, the hospital administration is refusing to release any information about two of the cases.
Arab News had been trying to ascertain the condition of the two students since they were transferred from Makkah earlier this week, but no additional information has been released. Officials at KKNG have repeatedly broken promises of a meeting.
Meanwhile, this reporter toured a number of girls’ schools in Jeddah and spoke to teachers and students about how they felt about safety standards in the wake of the Makkah fire.
An Intermediate school headmistress, who preferred to remain anonymous, explained how she arranged a fire drill in the rented building where the school operates.
"I tried to teach 400 students how to react in case we have a fire and, to be perfectly honest, the results were not at all encouraging. The main problem is that we have two gates at the school, but we have only one staircase. I could not evacuate the students without having them crowd dangerously on the stairs," she said, in a chilling echo of the circumstances in which the girls died in the Makkah fire.
Asked if there was any safety equipment in the building provided by the Presidency of Girls’ Education (PGE), she said: "They provide us with fire extinguishers, but we have to maintain them at our own expense."
After the Makkah fire, there was a public debate on whether there are PGE regulations in schools that all the gates should be locked from the outside. No documents have been represented to Arab News, despite detailed inquiries, to prove that this regulation is in fact officially enforced, although rumors of the document’s existence abound.
In any case, only four out of the 10 schools visited by this reporter had a spare key to the main school gate.
The efforts of Arab News to get a comment about this situation from the PGE’s women supervisory office in Jeddah failed. The office of Dr. Terefa Al-Showe’er, the general supervisor, also refused to answer our questions.
It was meanwhile reported yesterday that the PGE was not allocated any land on which to build their own schools during the past 14 years, according to Abdul Rahman Al-Ahmad, assistant undersecretary for projects and maintenance at PGE.
Addressing a press conference in Riyadh, Ahmad emphasized the importance of establishing independent schools and of simultaneously phasing out rented buildings. The PGE has presented a national plan to the government, demanding the construction of 5,054 new school buildings in 10 years.
Ahmad said that the PGE will require SR250 million to provide safety facilities such as fire extinguishers, smoke detectors and emergency exits.
He also disclosed plans to create 400 new positions for trainees to teach female teachers how to deal with accidents involving students. The Civil Defense has already presented a plan to train PGE teachers on safety measures.
There continues to be reports of panics at schools throughout the Kingdom. Students at a girls’ school in Jeddah’s Al-Ghaleel district were yesterday evacuated after a gas leakage in a nearby building. A Civil Defense official said that 700 liters of gas had leaked from Al-Harbi cold storage.
