The Jeddah Municipality is set to launch shortly a state-of-the-art project for monitoring and managing the cleaning of the entire Corniche area.

The spokesman of the Jeddah Municipality, Abdul Aziz Al-Ghamdi, said the municipality has already installed a high-tech system to track and ensure faultless cleaning operations in the whole Corniche area.

The system, he said, will show where cleaning activities are not being properly undertaken or where cleaning trucks are not operating as scheduled. It will also record the level of work accomplished by each piece of cleaning equipment including dumpsters and indicate whether the bins have been emptied or not, he said.

Tourists to the coastal city of Jeddah routinely complain about the deteriorating level of cleanliness and the piles of garbage lying almost everywhere near Corniche.

While many people worry about the consequences of the increasingly poor hygiene, the visitors to the Corniche are also adding to the woes by littering the beach, parks, green spaces and roads with leftover food, bottles and tissue paper.

They don’t seem to notice that their lack of civic sense is converting the beautiful picnicking location into a frightening breeding ground for disease-carrying insects and rodents.

Abu Abdul Rahman, a regular visitor to the Corniche for many years, said the repugnant habit of littering the area with food waste is a recent development.

“A few years ago, we never saw garbage anywhere other than the litter boxes placed at strategic points in this beautiful location. However, the recent practice of spoiling the area with their waste is deeply worrying,” Abu Abdul Rahman told Arab News with a tone of disappointment.

Abdullah Al-Sibyani and Ali bin Taleb, two residents of the Shati district close to Corniche, said they feared that the poor sanitation has led to a pungent odor in the area especially when the temperature rises.

“We are also afraid that killer diseases like Dengue fever will come to the city again because of the worsening environmental cleanliness.”