ALKHOBAR, 28 October 2006 — A rather stinky problem developed on Alkhobar’s Corniche in the early afternoon on Thursday. Asphalt in the southbound lanes at the Ninth Street intersection with Prince Turki Bin Abdul Aziz Street — the road along Alkhobar’s seaside — began cracking and water started spurting up from underneath the street. The roadway was soon soaked and larger chunks of asphalt began cracking away. Police closed the street at the intersection and diverted traffic around the break but that was only the first step in solving the problem.
On a normal working day it would have been simple to mobilize teams to handle what was quickly becoming a messy situation, but this was the Eid Al-Fitr holiday and nearly all the staff of the Water and Sewage Authority were on leave. An initial engineering inspection and a quick look at drawings led to a scramble to gather serious resources. The problem appeared to involve one of the city’s main sewage lines. Proprietors of nearby restaurants and clothing stores went into a state of high anxiety as filthy, stinking liquid slowly crept out of the immediate vicinity of the intersection.
It took about four hours to bring two mechanical excavators, bulldozers, water pumps, dump trucks, sewage trucks and a host of other smaller handheld equipment to the site. Two teams of engineers and laborers had to be mobilized as well. By 6 p.m. the equipment was being set up at the site and within the hour the excavation had begun. Darkness had fallen by that time but streetlights provided ample illumination of the area. It was rather eerie, however, to be working in the roadway of the busiest street in town, with traffic packed in all around the Ninth Street intersection.
Shortly before 11 p.m., the source of the problem was uncovered. According to Ahmed Al-Bassam, deputy manager of the Eastern Province branch of the Water and Sewage Authority, “There has been a break in the pressurized sewage line from the pump station to the treatment plant in Al-Aziziah. The reason for the break will not be known until experts have checked the portion of broken pipe but there are numerous possibilities for the pipe failure. Anything from heavy loads on the roadbed to the age of the pipe itself could be responsible for the break, but we really must wait until the investigation is complete before giving a definitive answer.”
Repairing the break was extremely unpleasant with workers forced to go into the six-meter deep pit, at times up to their knees in sewage. The Civil Works Construction Company (CWC) was responsible for completing the repair in record time and the government authorities are quite pleased with their performance. CWC began filling the hole again at about 2 a.m. and the roadway was back in use yesterday.
One criticism that must be on the incident, however, is in regards to the lack of personal safety equipment for the workers in the pit. While the men were wearing rubber boots to the knee, that was the total extent of their safety equipment. The workers had no hard hats, even though the mechanical earth movers were swinging about and digging and dumping gravel near their heads.
The ordinary trousers and shirts of the all the workers in the pit were soaked through with sewage and it is certain that their eyes and respiratory systems were exposed to aerosolized sewage containing viruses, bacteria and parasites. It was unacceptable that these expatriate laborers were put into a situation where they could potentially contract a host of debilitating infections such as hepatitis. More care must be taken to protect those who are expected to serve the needs of our society under difficult, dangerous conditions.
