Hamoud Abu Talib
Okaz
I think it is time for us to think beyond the Jeddah rain and floods after Makkah Emir Prince Khaled Al-Faisal’s disclosure that Jeddah Municipality has not properly implemented the rainwater drainage project in the cosmopolitan city.
The emir has submitted a report to the King in this respect and asked the ministries of finance and municipal and rural affairs to look into the matter seriously.
The emir’s statement may be interpreted in different ways. The Finance Ministry may not have released the amount required for the project or it might have paid the amount but the Municipal and Rural Affairs Ministry might not have allocated the money for the purpose. Another possibility is that the municipality received the amount but did not implement the much-needed project.
Each of these possibilities is worse than the other and we had expected the emir’s office to follow up the project’s progress closely in order to preempt any form of misconduct.
This long delay should not have happened as the government approved the multi-billion riyal project seven years ago following the massive flooding that inundated a substantial portion of the city.
The municipality did not wait for long to respond to the emir’s statement as its spokesman made it unequivocally clear that no feasibility studies on the rainwater drainage project in Jeddah had been approved. “The present studies are just proposals,” he added.
However, the spokesman pointed out that the municipality had built pipelines along major streets in Jeddah to divert rainwater but this program covered only 30 percent of the city. They have not implemented any rainwater drainage system inside residential districts, he said.
The issue is not only the delay in implementing the project but is more serious than previously thought.
The spokesman’s statement will definitely hurt all those who have been waiting for this rainwater drainage project for the past seven years.
We had a feeling that the project was delayed due to a conflict between the municipality and the Water and Electricity Ministry or other parties as we have seen them shifting blames.
The revelation of the truth is a big shock for the residents of Jeddah. They have now realized that everybody was working to divert their attention, not to divert rainwater drowning the city. We can expect similar games to turn our attention from other projects that the authorities fail to implement.
