Many people who live in Jeddah are still in deep shock at the devastation and grievous loss of life caused when heavy rains and flash floods hit the city Wednesday. The sight of the new King Abdullah Street underpass completely full of water at the Madinah junction was frankly astounding. How could this piece of road have been constructed in such a way that at the first heavy rain it filled like a bath?
Indeed there is now a whole range of questions that highway engineers and urban planners are going to have to answer. The urban planners face perhaps the toughest questions. Jeddah has grown rapidly often across wadis that were once essential to the run-off of the heavy rains that do strike. Indeed such rains were actually responsible for the formation of the wadis in the first place. However, even though it is dry for long periods, a wadi is in reality no less of a river than the Nile, the Jordan, the Tigris or the Euphrates.
All too rarely, however, do we see culverts built below urban development, to ensure that floodwaters will be channeled away from buildings, car parks and roads. Of hardly less importance is the almost total lack of storm drains. As one angry Sulaimaniyah district resident commented, other countries like Malaysia have deep drains, which quickly carry away water during a storm. It is no good arguing that in the Far East monsoon downpours are regular weather features. Ferocious storms like that which hit Jeddah Wednesday have occurred in living memory, even though not with annual regularity.
Besides it is the planners’ job to design and specify urban works to cover all extremes of weather, especially when the entire world is having to cope with accelerating changes to weather patterns. Yet it is patently and tragically obvious that no such provisions were made to allow heavy rainwater to be channeled off through proper drains. Worse still, an underpass was built in such a position and in such a way that it was bound to become a sinkhole for millions of gallons of storm water that had nowhere else to go. If there was, in fact, some sort of drainage in the bottom of the stricken underpass, it is horrifically clear that it was not working.
So much for the town planners. But where Wednesday were the emergency teams? Where were the fire pumps to pump out the underpass? Where were the rescuers? Where — and this is the hardest question to ask — where were the police when traffic control was essential, not least to stop more drivers heading into harm’s way and possibly their deaths?
The failures in Jeddah’s flood disasters have been multiple and extremely serious. No doubt officials responsible will blame each other. What is needed, however, is a clear will to accept the terrible errors and shortcomings and more importantly, to quickly set about putting them all right, to ensure that a disaster of this proportion never happens again.
