Cleaning up this mess will take time

• Last Updated: November 17. 2009 8:41PM UAE / November 17. 2009 4:41PM GMT

As its name suggests, public health is everyone’s problem. The National reported yesterday that inadequate facilities to handle sewage in some labour camps in Al Quoz had created a public health emergency. The consequences of such an oversight do not bear imagining or repeating. Thankfully, Dubai is doing something about it: a sewage pipeline is being built to transport waste water to treatment plants and replace an inefficient and expensive tanker transport system.

Those employers who allowed septic tanks to go unemptied, because of the rising costs of tankers, should be condemned in the strongest terms. They have a moral duty and responsibility under the nation’s labour laws to safeguard the health of the men they employ. It must be said, however, that the problems are not entirely of their making.

One reason that demand for tankers to transport sewage has gone up is that, until recently, Dubai had only one treatment plant. Lorry drivers could expect to wait up to 50 hours to unload, leading to increased prices as transport companies bought additional lorries and charged extra to compensate for the time wasted in queues. Even so, they could not keep up with the demand for their services. At one point last summer, Dubai was forced to dump the sewage from 500 lorries a day into a pit in the desert. None of this excuses the actions of the companies, but it does underline the strain Dubai’s infrastructure is under.

A complete solution is still some years away. The pipeline will not be finished for at least a year and a half, and the question of how Dubai will treat all the effluent it produces in a day remains. The new Jebel Ali treatment plant will treat 300,000 cubic metres of waste water a day; Al Quoz alone already produces that much.

It is difficult to fault the Dubai government. The entire country’s rate of growth has been astonishing. Every emirate is struggling to provide the physical infrastructure to support a burgeoning population. Roads are jammed, the electricity grid is strained, and in Abu Dhabi (indeed until recently in Dubai too) housing supply is woefully behind demand. But everywhere you look, the emirates are taking steps to resolve these issues. It will take time, but if they continue their commitment, it can and will be done.