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 By Habib TRABELSI
Sewage has invaded the streets of Jeddah, the great port and tourist metropolis of Saudi Arabia (west), dubbed the “Mermaid of the Red Sea”, infesting houses, hospitals and mosques and arousing fears of a new “dengue fever” which has already caused the deaths of many people in the past.
This cosmopolitan metropolis of over 3.4 million inhabitants is constantly threatened with an ecological catastrophe and is deliberately on the road to ruin, according to the evidence of environmental experts quizzed by the local press. Overflowing excrement
Today, the town was literally drowned in nauseous waters and submerged in foul odours after an accumulation of excrement and waste that had overspilled the sewers, detailed in graphic reports in recent days by newspapers with photos of cars and inhabitants wading through the stagnant and nauseating waters.
According to the press, the overflow of excrement followed a strike lasting over several days by the drivers of some 2000 tankers responsible for pumping the sewers, due to a dispute with the National Water Company.
“The Old Mermaid drowns in lakes of sewage” is the headline of the electronic newspaper “Sabq”, relating numerous testimonies of inhabitants in houses, shops, hospitals and mosques, besieged and inundated with polluted water and horrified at the idea of the “Dengue fever”. “Dengue fever” Alert
Several newspapers and websites have rung alarm bells and warned against a new epidemic of the “dengue fever”, a virus mainly transmitted by mosquitoes, that decimates mainly the animal but also the human population.
“A horror gripped the people of Saudi Arabia after the appearance of the dengue fever cases in Jeddah and Mecca”, Mohamed Sayed Ali had reported on the 13th April on “Islamonline”. Deaths already!
Quoting government medical sources, the official Saudi press agency SPA had at the time announced “33 cases of dengue fever illness in Jeddah and 103 in Mecca since the beginning of the month”.
The daily “Okaz” had, on the 12th April, reported that a Saudi man and woman, aged respectively 20 and 22 years old, afflicted by the virus, had finally succumbed the previous day at King Faisal hospital in Mecca.
The following day, other newspapers had reported the hospitalisation in Mecca of more than 100 people affected by the disease. Most of them were discharged from the hospitals after receiving emergency treatment. An American solution to “eradicate” the evil
“But what about the construction projects of modern sewage treatment plants that caused the haemorrhaging of the State budget?” said an indignant reader of “Sabq”. In any case, the municipality of Jeddah is currently studying “a strategy to fight mosquitoes” responsible for the transmission of the virus and the spreading of the disease.
But this time, it is an American company that has been called in to “eradicate this fever by using biological processes, instead of chemical means”, stated the website “Anaween” on Thursday. The Ogre-sewers
In the meantime, the “sewers of the Mermaid of the Red Sea” continue to overflow. But the sewers in Saudi Arabia also have the tragic reputation of being “man eaters”.
Indeed the press periodically reports of children, the elderly or visually impaired people swallowed by the sewers, whose manhole covers have been stolen, transforming themselves into open graves in the Kingdom’s streets.
Saudi Arabia has, for several months, indeed, experienced an upsurge in thefts, often of the most incongruous kind, as a notable result, according to the local press, “of poverty, unemployment and of society’s crumbling moral values.”
The press has reported that telephone cables, road signs and manhole covers have been stolen to be sold to scrap merchants, at a time when a shortage of steel is rampant throughout the Kingdom spawning an unprecedented black market. Translated by Naima BOUTELDJA
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