Whenever something goes terribly wrong involving a municipality the blame game is inevitably played. Accountability is something that needs to be dodged rather than accepted with a sincere effort to rectify the thing that went wrong.
Such is the tragic case of a young father and his 5-year-old son who died a horrible death in a sewer on Tahlia Street in Jeddah.
The family had just left a supermarket on Tahlia when the boy walked ahead, apparently stumbled and fell into an open hole just 90 centimeters wide. He fell into a tank measuring 6 meters by 12 meters. His father jumped in after his son. A crowd gathered and a passing traffic police officer stopped, went into the well and pulled the body of the father out. The father and son had died from inhaling toxic gas.
Saudi social media users are understandably outraged. Open sewers and drainpipes, exposed wires in street lampposts and electrical junction boxes are a common sight in Jeddah and elsewhere. But what outraged Saudis even more was the Jeddah Municipality’s callous response to the deaths of the father and son.
The municipality insisted the open sewer pipe was on a private property and the responsibility of the supermarket. Municipal officials seem to have forgotten that sewers are a public service and the ultimate responsibility of the municipality. Municipalities are responsible for imposing safety standards on private business and enforcing those standards. Municipalities impose fines on businesses who improperly dispose wastewater and on residents who breed animals in urban areas. Yet, mysteriously, they say they are not responsible for open sewer lines.
The Jeddah Municipality and many businesses throughout the city are remarkably cavalier about the safety of people who use sidewalks. Very rarely are ongoing projects, which require digging and breaking up large chunks of cement on sidewalks, are adequately marked with orange cones and yellow construction tape. Many projects are left unattended for weeks, if not months. Right around the corner from where I live is a huge hole on the side of the street with two large piles of dirt, but no safety tape or cones to warn drivers and pedestrians. It’s been that way for at least six months.
In Jeddah’s Faysaliah District off of Rawdah Road entire neighborhoods have streets barely passable with potholes and bumps.
Businesses are usually indifferent to these serious safety hazards. They rarely sweep up the garbage in front of their establishments let alone complain to the municipality that there is an uncovered hole that could get someone killed or injured.
It’s as if we have learned nothing from the floods some years ago. People were fined. People went to jail. But the neglect of our infrastructure continues.
Municipalities subcontract work to Saudi companies, which in turn employ South Asian workers to perform maintenance on our streets. To us they are just cheap labor. Whether they are qualified to perform such tasks may be known to their employer, but it’s unlikely the municipality has an inkling whether workers are qualified to perform repairs to our infrastructure. What is known is these laborers are often not supervised in the field. They may be ordered from one job to another without ever completing the previous task, hence open sewer lines and exposed electrical wiring.
This negligence — and that is really what it is — is nothing more than willful disregard for the safety of Jeddawis. The agency responsible for the negligence that led to the deaths of the father and son must be held accountable. And I think Saudis and expats expect nothing less than a full accounting of what happened to these victims, why it happened, and how we can prevent it from happening in the future.
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