Lt. Gen. Saad Al-Tuwaijri, director general of the Civil Defense, said despite government authorities being trained in drills to act orderly during emergencies, society itself is not geared to act in an event an accident occurs.
“We do our best to train government authorities on how to evacuate a location when any fire breaks out or other emergencies, but people are not disciplined enough to follow the training they had received during an incident. What needs to be done is for people themselves to undergo a lot of exercises and courses on orderly evacuation and on how to act in various emergencies,” he said.
In the private school fire in Jeddah on Saturday most of the injuries suffered were due to the haphazard rush to escape. Also the crowding at the exits where lots of pushing and shoving led to the injuries, he said.
“This rush to escape without any order or system is much more dangerous than the fire itself. In today’s fire, the school with 700 students had a toll of two dead and 45 injured with many suffering suffocation and inability to get out. This could have been minimized if the teachers and students had known and followed an evacuation drill,” he said.
Al-Tuwaijri said authorities in the country are well trained and ready to assist in such cases, but the people need to learn and practice these exercises and surviving techniques in order to help the authorities manage emergencies and calamities.
“We used the ‘Red Report’ that is usually set in motion to rescue people since the first minute of the fire. Such report sends out a signal to all government authorities to be ready, such as Civil Defense, Red Crescent, hospitals, traffic and police,” he said.
In addition to this, our future plan is to send observers to schools and they will be in charge of observing the evacuation process.
“We can’t ensure how strictly the schools are implementing the evacuation plans. Our duty is to give them instructions, and the school’s administrator’s duty is to make sure that evacuation process is put into the school’s system with regular drills and practice,” said Al-Tuwaijri.
There have been rumors that some girls’ schools are locked from outside by the guard, and, in that case, Al-Tuwaijri confirmed that the evacuation teams, police, Civil Defense, and Red Crescent are allowed to break the locked doors to control the situation.
According to Kawthar Al-Jehani, a Saudi teacher in an intermediate school, “Most of the girls and staff are not able to escape if a fire breaks out in a building, because they do not remember the drills taught to them,” she said.
She said, “Despite the fact that many schools contains several exits and conduct mock fire drills to prepare the students for emergencies, students consider these exercises a kind of game, and refuse to take the instructions seriously.”
The Ministry of Education, in cooperation with Civil Defense, organizes several campaigns, but no one takes these campaigns seriously, said a Saudi school’s administrator who preferred to be anonymous.
The main problem that girls’ schools suffer from is not having an ideal school building with open spaces to escape.
“The Ministry of Education has tried to prepare schools that are prepared for emergencies, while being able to accommodate many. The problem is that most teachers and students don’t know what to do when a fire breaks out,” she said.
