Winter rains aren’t terribly strange in the northern hemisphere, but any substantial rain is strange enough in Saudi Arabia. This year, heavy rains are starting to create problems with the millions performing Haj in the city of Mecca, according to this report from the Associated Press. While it’s unlikely that the rain will be an issue at the Great Mosque, other rituals of the Haj take place in open fields and on hillsides, where it could present serious issues.
Islam’s hajj: rain and fears of swine flu
HADEEL AL-SHALCHIJIDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Muslim pilgrims circled Islam’s holiest site Wednesday in their traditional white robes, with a few additions _ umbrellas and face masks _ as the opening of the annual hajj was complicated by torrential rains and fears of swine flu.
Saudi authorities have been planning ways for months to inhibit the spread of swine flu during the pilgrimage, which is seen as an incubator for the virus. The four-day event is one of the most crowded in the world, with more than 3 million people from every corner of the globe packed shoulder to shoulder in prayers and rites.
Now they are scrambling to deal with sudden, unexpected downpours that could worsen one of the gathering’s perennial dangers: deadly stampedes.
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The excellent photographs at Future Husbands and Wives of Saudis show the terrains involved.
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November:26:2009 - 03:24
John- Thanks for linking FHWS on your blog. Chiara did an awesome job with the Hajj pictures.
November:26:2009 - 08:42
This is not the story. The story is 77 dead and counting in Jeddah. Flooding washed people away. Helicopters airlifting people off roofs. (God knows what south Jeddah looks like today because nobody goes down there to cover those untouchables.) It’s annoying to see the media focus on some hajis holding plastic tarp over their heads and lauding security and H1N1 efforts when Jeddah was a disaster yesterday with cars being washed off highways by wadi floods. This is corruption in action: steal the money used to build adequate infrastructure to deal with this problem. The media has dropped the ball on this. I’m sick of reading about the Haj, H1N1 (yesterday’s flooding probably killed way more people than swine flu has in the past year), how awesome the security forces are doing, BLAH BLAH BLAH. LAME!
November:26:2009 - 09:04
You have a point, Anonymous. I know one hospital went into crisis when it flooded in Jeddah-surgeries were in progress etc. And I heard (can’t confirm) a bridge went down with fatalities in South Jeddah.
There is no drainage- so small amounts of rain cause flooding- and yesterday was no small amount of rain. There will now, I’m sure, be outbreaks of mosquito born diesease soon with all the standing water their is around the city. I’m more scared of Dengue fever than Swine flu.
November:26:2009 - 09:23
I appreciate the updates and attention being given to Jeddah. That, unfortunately, isn’t what I’m finding in the media. As I’m posting from the US, I just don’t get that kind of information unless and until others in the Kingdom point it out. So, thanks very much.
We can hope that the media does a better job covering this today.
November:26:2009 - 09:31
Hi Sandy, apparently King Abdullah St. and Falasteen St. both became flood channels for wadi flooding from East Jeddah. If you look at a map of Jeddah, those two streets run east/west so the water used them as culverts to get to the Red Sea. The bridge you refer to might be over King Abdullah St. (or Road, not sure). Water up to the bottom of the overpass. Reports say there’s a bus and several cars under water and nobody is sure if people got out or if they will find bodies. A family in a villa on a compound was trapped on their roof when five-feet of sewage and water filled the ground floor. It took nine hours for rescuers to arrive. An imam and his six family members reportedly drowned — they found his body in the Red Sea. The death toll will surely rise. What’s infuriating is that it was not really a heavy rain. It probably rains like that every day in Mumbai during the rainy season. This is corruption-related death. They build hospitals and billion dollar “economic cities” everywhere (so people can get rich on commercial real estate deals and contracts) but they’ve neglected basic infrastructure, like flood channels for wadis and sewerage inside the city.
John: I wasn’t referring to your blog. I’m just sick of reading abotu swine flu and how the media just kisses the butts of Civil Defense and just steno-graphically repeats what officials want them to say. As far as I’m concerned this does more damage than not covering it at all.
November:26:2009 - 10:41
@2@5 well said!
john, this is a perfect example outcome of the corruption of al-Saud’s. we need our own own story to bash them. AFP already has a story out. there is no way to maneuver out of concluding this is squarely their fault.
November:26:2009 - 11:07
The problems of infrastructure in in the KSA are legion. I put the blame primarily on the go-go 70s, when real money started flowing in, when building became both a political desire and social necessity. I don’t see it as a very clear example of corruption. Rather, I see it as one of limited competence and/or bad decision-making.
As I and others have pointed out, administration is not the Saudi government’s strongest suit. Critical details–such as storm drainage–tended to be overlooked and by the time they were recognized as crucial, it proved very unappetizing to fix the problems, if not forbiddingly expensive.
Would the residents of Jeddah and Mecca be willing to have all of their streets torn up to install storm drains? Could the country and municipalities afford to do so? Are there enough competent workers to do the job right? Would this necessitate bringing in another million or so foreign laborers because Saudis don’t like wielding shovels?
This is not a Saudi-only problem, of course. If you go much further south in the US than Philadelphia, you’ll find that both states and municipalities tend to plan for ‘average’ rather than worst-case weather scenarios. The District of Columbia, for instance, is notorious for its insufficient supply of snow plows. Now, you don’t often get deep snow in DC; that’s just a meteorological fact. (‘Deep snow’ for the District is about 4″.) But when you get it, it tends to completely shut down a metropolitan area of over three million people, sometimes for days.
It’s a difficult problem, finding the right balance between spending money for the exceptional when there are many competing demands on that money for more usual problems. As Hurricane Katrina showed a few years back, the State of Louisiana, the city of New Orleans, and the federal government all dropped the ball on mitigating the effects of major storms. They took a gamble and they lost. They decided the money necessary to protect a city–built below sea level, don’t forget–was better spent elsewhere.
Retrofitting Saudi cities to include storm drains is not a trivial proposition. Is it a necessary one? That’s up to the Saudi governments–national and municipal–to decide. As there are no income taxes in the Kingdom, there are no ‘taxpayers’ to demand change or even accountability.
Perhaps that could be another thing to put on the list of things that could be improved in Saudi Arabia?
November:26:2009 - 11:28
@7
nice writeup…probably should go in your new flood post.
November:26:2009 - 11:30
Good point, John. Income tax and voting makes people take real notice of what their lawmakers are doing.
(now back to the turkey)
November:26:2009 - 12:05
Not to worry… I’m either too dim or too thick-skinned to take offense at much!
I really don’t think this is a matter of corruption, unless there were contracts let to build storm drainage and they were never built. I think it was more a matter of bad (or insufficient) planning, of not seeing a potential problem when it was still potential and not real.
Over the past few years, the Saudi media–particularly those based in Jeddah–have pointed out the shortcoming of the lack of drainage. Some measures have been taken, but clearly not enough. As I’ve said elsewhere, fixing the problem, really fixing it, is not trivial. Might the money be better spent fixing it than on economic cities? Certainly could be. But that’s for the Saudis to work out.
As to why this story wasn’t covered in today’s papers, I can’t say for certain. I don’t know what time the rains came and did their damage, nor do I know precisely what the papers’ deadlines are. What shows up in the next day’s media will be more telling, IMO.
November:26:2009 - 13:14
John–thanks for pointing to the pictures on FHWS. The second to last one for sure captures the potential for mudslides and sliding people. When I first saw it I thought it was a construction sight with everything scrapped off, then a mining area like those in Northern Ontario that have been described as moonscapes, and finally realized it was an areal view of Mecca with the natural barrenness of the hills and plains surrounding it.
I appreciate your analyses of the the flooding problems and the reasons for the lack of infrastructure. Other places that come to mind are Venice where floods have proven a cultural as well as a human disaster; the 1980 Christmas earthquake in the South of Italy where the delay (dare one say incompetence) of the Italian rescue services combined with unusually cold weather caused far more deaths than the earthquake itself; and the same Native Canadian tribe that gets flooded out each spring runoff, has contaminated water, is evacuated, and then is moved back to the same reserve and decrepid reserve housing a few months later, so it can all start over again in the next few months.
Looks like the American media just caught on to the Jeddah flooding.
November:26:2009 - 13:16
There’s the mayor of Jeddah in the 80s who took funds for sewerage and bought a nice SanFran townhouse with part of the stolen money. Then Crown Prince Abdullah absolved him. Also, the chain of contracting is nothing but a series of pound-of-flesh deductions from the principle. You assign X and 20% is hacked away at each level of sub-contracting. The lack of transparency also means that there’s probably much more corruption than ever bubbles up to the surface to be observed.
There are tons of empty under-staffed hospitals. Why? Because the best way to skim public finance is to build something. It doesn’t matter if that thing actually ends up doing what it’s built for: the construction project IS the end-game, because lots of money changes hands.
I remember that story from Shakaka. Kid gets his arms ripped off in a threshing machine. They went to a hospital that was recently built, a hospital that the local media ballyhooed as the King’s magnanimous effort to being health care to the rural folk. Two years after this hospital was inaugurated, it didn’t have a qualified doctor. The kid died on his way to another hospital. Nobody covers this stuff, and we go about thinking that corruption isn’t really a big deal in the KSA precisely because anyone who covers it gets kicked out of the country, or fired, or even jailed.
Real estate is probably ground zero for corruption in the KSA, build a hospital — it doesn’t matter if you ever put qualified doctors in them — the people who build the hospital walk away with lots of money. Public works projects coming in a close second. It doesn’t just happen in KSA of course. I knew a guy who oversaw the construction of a tile factory in Lesotho. The factory was built. It never made one tile. The building of the factory was the goal and the UK contractor walked away with a huge chunk of change from God-knows-what kind of corrupt local dealing was going on.
It’s a little disingenuous (in my humble opinion) to say “yes, but it happens in the USA, too.” The US is a much more open system, and as they say: sunlight kills germs. The level of corruption is far greater I think in a country like the KSA. It’s so bad some of it isn’t even considered corruption — you just pay somebody a huge sum for “facilitating” something.
And the West is more than happy to play the game: If the UK and the US arms makers (or private contractors) compete to bribe the right princes for defense contracts, it just considered the cost of doing business. But at the end of the day: it’s a bribe and it’s illegal (at least in the US and UK) and it is dangerous, and it kills people.
November:26:2009 - 14:25
Those corruption stories certainly don’t shine a good light on the Saudi system. My point, though, was that incompetence is a better excuse for the many things that don’t work–or don’t work as they’re supposed to work–than out-and-out corruption. Incompetence comes in at many levels, from the one that decides state employees can get by without raises for going on 20 years (how could this not lead to corruption?) to not thinking of the consequences of actions (handing over education to the religious authorities), down to the fourth-level clerk who got his job because of who his uncle is, not because he had the first clue about how to do his job.
Yes, there’s venality in the Saudi systems, no question. That venality, though, isn’t usefully collapsed into the term ‘corruption’. Much of it has to do with the traditional and culturally-approved system of patron/client relations, where someone with a job is expected to do favors for his family, is expected to spread whatever wealth comes across his palm. That system worked, for better or worse, for millennia. It’s only now (or in the recent past) starting to show its limitations and patent unfairness. It wasn’t that long ago that the ‘spoils’ system was the modus operandi of US politics. It wasn’t seen as corruption until one day it was seen as corruption.
My point in raising the US in the previous post was not to say, ‘Corruption happens everywhere’ though. It was to say that incompetence reigns just about everywhere and it’s a hard fight to win a war against it. Poor education systems, of course, don’t help…
November:26:2009 - 21:17
grrr you guys didn’t move on the the more appropriate post so i guess i’ll put my comment here as well.
@12 you beat me to it.
—
john, i usually agree with your posts in general and my responses are only complimentary to your posts. here, i insist this is squarely the fault of corruption. bad decision making in the government is both inherent and the result of keeping the al-Saud’s on top. incompetence and corruption is coupled in saudi arabia. proper oversight can limit both corruption and incompetence. this doesn’t exist in saudi arabia of course.
many resources are spent for the benefit of palaces. even if there was a capacity for proper city planning, the princes can manipulate plans as they please. also, the corrupt (the al-Sauds and their cohorts) leave little for the money supposedly allocated for infrastructure.
ask the people of jiddah and they’ll tell you the roads are crap to begin with regardless of the pure economical decision about how much to spend for drainage. it’s to the point where sewage is not routed let alone rain water. they will also tell you about construction works that seem to never end on the same spot.
as for taxation, some independent scholars will argue that God only instructed for zakat tax. therefore, any other tax is forbidden. of course this can be debated. but this opinion falls into the al-Saud’s philosophy very well. they want control and they want their subjects to come and beg for money. so, taxation in this corrupt system is worse as you can bet the government will not be transparent. and people are already complaining that since they control the oil wealth, why do they charge for the issuance of various government documents?
you might ask how can islamic govenments be accountable in its spending of public funds without taxation? well, islam has an institution for that: hisbah…yes, the saudi version is the disaster and the pointlessness that is the commission for the promotion of virtue… hisbah comes from the arabic word for accounting and accountability. the saudi commission of course are empowered over the subjects but not the government and are not interested in financial corruption.
you might want to read some american accounts of how Bechtel and aramco were frustrated with their dealings with the al-Sauds.
here’s how saudi media will handle this:
- showcase the rescue operations
- it was an act of God, therefore there was nothing that could have been done to save lives
November:26:2009 - 22:34
See my response here.
November:26:2009 - 23:32
Concerning post number 7, I would much rather be covered in snow than shit (sewage water). That is just a personal preference however. I am in Riyadh and don’t have really any complaints. One summer there was a shortage of water and I felt like killing someone (just an expression calm down people…we use those expressions freely in the US) especially after I learned that some prince was filling his fake lake.
One can think of several examples of where Saudis do actually pay taxes and one person here came up with a very good example. Thus, if those in charge are doing a shitty job then perhaps people should collect their own money to fix the streets. Isn’t that what riba money is supposed to be used for toilets/bathrooms included. Come on we all there is plenty riba money circlating out there.
It is similar to the riba issue with Islamic versus Non Islamic charges. What is in a name that by any other name would smell the same.
November:26:2009 - 23:59
F begging for money
I am trying to be good but is so much funner being naughty!
November:27:2009 - 06:22
I certainly agree that there is a degree of bad planning going on, and that the House of Saud realizes that to keep in power it must “give back” something to keep the population abiding. It does this through heavy subsidization of water and power as well as a (relatively) generous social security system for citizens (albeit there are serious problems with the state hospital system). But I do think lack of transparency and the paternal aspect of Saudi statecraft leads to serious corruption. Sure, the media will cover corruption at a hyper-local level, usually in the context of wasta, and often with a cheeky attitude of “oh, well, that’s how we do things here, yuk, yuk.” What is absolutely off limits is the Big Corruption involving Major Players. Because this is no-go, the public has no idea what goes on, but they see the results every day: living in the World’s Richest Third World Country with everything that implies.
November:27:2009 - 06:28
“I am in Riyadh and don’t have really any complaints. One summer there was a shortage of water and I felt like killing someone”
- There’s a reason why Riyadh is better off than most of the rest of the country: it’s the center of power in the KSA, and there are too many powerful players there not to fix the roads or ensure adequate services. (Also anywhere oil and Aramco is to be found, the services are good.) It’s a far cry from, say, Al-Lith, south of Jeddah with its mud villages in the middle of nowhere, or even Jeddah itself, with its horrible roads and districts that can go a month without water in the pipes that turn into sewage swamps when it rains, followed by weeks of standing, fetid pools of filth that breed mosquitoes and spread disease.