A Strange Day at Work

I had a very strange day at work last week when I became an honoury member of the Saudi Civil Defence Force.

I was visiting a paper recycling plant in Khobar Industrial city to inspect damage caused by a fire 3 days before. As I arrived it became apparent that the fire was still burning 3 days on and had caused substantial damage. At least 3 warehouses had been totally gutted along with an employee accommodation block. In addition a large quantity of raw material had gone up in flames.

As you can probably guess, there is no such thing as health and safety or safe working practices here in the Magic Kingdom and consequently, the paper company thought nothing of storing flamable paper out in the sun and next to items of hot machinery.

I managed to get onto the roof of a nearby building to view as much of the damage as possible as the Civil Defence (fire brigade) were still tackling the fire and wouldn’t let me near to the damage.

A "fireman" tries to put out a fire by weeing on it!!

The Civil Defence are not what you could call a professional fire fighting service. Their equipment is basic and at least 20 years old. They always take at least 30 mins to arrive and often longer. I recently went to a foam factory situated 5 mins drive from Al Khobars central fire station. However, it still took the Civil Defence 40 mins to arrive and then they decided not to tackle the fire and let the whole facotry burn down!!!


They dont even wear fire protective gear. As you may have noticed from the photograph they wear police uniforms! Indeed, the civil defence are part of the Police in Saudi Arabia. They are the only fire fighters I have seen who like to have a smoke while tackling a fire.

As I was standing on the roof taking down details and breathing in copious amounts of smoke and ash, I noticed smoke rising behind me from a completely different section of the plant. I pointed this out to the general manager of the plant who was up on the roof with me.

He shouted “Fire fire!!!” and went a bit berserk as it slowly dawned on me that a new fire had started near to the main plant. From that point on everything was a bit of a blur. The company management and employees were running around like headless chickens. The Civil defence who were already on site, were in the usual Saudi fashion, in no hurry to move their fire trucks from the first fire to help tackle the second.

This was followed by a mad dash in a company lorry driven by the general manager to the site of the new fire, during which he almost crashed twice and actually skidded around 180' once.......in a lorry! As you can imagine, I was holding on for dear life and preaching caution to no avail!

Once we arrived at the site of the new fire, it was obvious that bails of recycled paper had caught fire and the flames were quickly spreading.

To cut a long story short, I ended up being drafted into a fire safety team and manned a hose directing water on to the burning paper until the civil defence arrived about 20 minutes later.




It was all very exciting. I even had to suggest to the on site fire safety officer that he try to isolated the burning paper by removing the bails of paper surround those that were burning. After explaining the logic of this several time he seemed to get the idea and dispatched several fork lift trucks and a bulldozer.

I left about an hour later. The fire was isolated but still burning merrily. As I left, I reflected that it had been a strange sort of a morning.

Unfortunately as I left site, a fire truck went through a road flooded with the water used to fight the fire. The fire truck splashed me from head to foot in a dirty combination of water mixed with ash and paper pulp. Nice!

This was the damage inside one warehouse when I went back 2 days later...oh dear total loss. Notice the buckled steel frame...of course I was able to wander freely about this dangerous structure which could collapse at any time....Saudi H&S...whats H&S???