JEDDAH, 28 December 2006 — The newly built Jamrat Bridge, which is open to pilgrims for the first time and currently has a capacity of 250,000 pilgrims an hour, will bring about a qualitative change in public safety, say officials at the Haj Research Institute. The SR4.2-billion high-tech structure in Mina aims at helping the hundreds of thousands of faithful carry out their stoning ritual without crowding the area.
The Civil Defense Department has called upon pilgrims not to rush to carry out the stoning ritual at peak times in order to avoid overcrowding and stampedes and thus not to put their lives and those of their fellow pilgrims at risk. It also advised pilgrims not to carry any baggage while going to the Jamrat as it would obstruct free flow of pilgrims.
A Saudi team recently returned from a crowd management workshop in Munich where they learned how to apply German experience in managing the tens of thousands of soccer fans during the last World Cup to the crowds of pilgrims at Jamrat. “We’ll apply what we have learned from Germany at Jamrat during this Haj season,” said Dr. Fadhil Othman of the Haj Research Institute, who participated in the workshop. The Saudi team watched how the Germans controlled large crowds of soccer fans rushing to an area of television screens to watch World Cup matches.
Police stopped people going to the area when 75 percent capacity was reached. They also made sure that there was adequate space in between people to move around freely without any pushing or pulling. “Another important thing we learned is that pilgrims should move in one direction and nobody should be allowed to move in the opposite direction,” he said while speaking about Jamrat crowd control strategy.
The first phase of the state-of-the-art Jamrat Bridge project with its first two new levels, is ready to receive the pilgrims. The ground floor and first floor have an average width of 70 meters, an engineer working for the project said, adding that the area near the pillars stoned in the Jamrat ritual was 80 meters wide. “We have also expanded the width of pillars to 30 meters to help a large number of pilgrims perform the stoning ritual at one time,” he said.
Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki, director of Haj Affairs at the Interior Ministry, said a special plan has been worked out to allow 1.25 million pilgrims complete the stoning ritual in five hours. He said a 9,000-man special force would be deployed in Mina to control the movement of pilgrims to Jamrat.
Al-Turki said the security forces would take control of all the streets leading to Jamrat in order to organize the movement of pilgrims.
