Last week, I wrote something which has resulted in many comments and telephone messages. What I meant was that the fire departments in Jizan and the southern region were involved in rescue missions and coping with disastrous floods a few years ago. And because of those experiences, they should have anticipated how to react to recent events in Jizan; their warnings and solutions, however, were not taken seriously.
It seems that the impossible is now the reality. Or so it appears in the statement of Gen. Saad Al-Tuwaijri, director general of the civil defense department. He was speaking on the arrival of a team of engineers in Jizan and he said: “The mission of the scientific team is to find the reasons for this flooding. The team will gather information that will link the amount of rainfall to flooding and so discover the level of current and possible danger.
“Their task is to find new ways to deal with the problem and to be prepared as early as possible to face those problems.” From the general’s statement, we can draw two conclusions. The first is that there will be scientific attempts in the future to prepare for problems. The second is that in the past, the fire department performed rescue missions after each crisis and then returned to their bases and simply waited for another crisis to happen. Gen. Al-Tuwaijri has now been alerted to the importance of scientific studies and has decided to take advantage of them to be prepared to face possible dangers. We thank God that he has been alerted, even if it came too late. We also hope that some of these scientific studies will expand to include other areas besides Jizan and other disasters besides floods. After all, we live in a very large country that may experience disasters such as earthquakes, floods and fires at any time.
- Arab News Local Press 21 August 2003
