It floods every year

It floods every year

The Dubai Municipality claims the rain shower last week too Dubai’s drainage system by surprise. But it floods every year…

December 15, 2009 2:55 by kippreport

If you’ve lived in Dubai long enough you’d know that the emirate’s streets are water logged during the rainy season. And every year the media gets the same reaction from the authorities: the city’s drainage system is superb, but Dubai got more rain than it expected.

This week, we got 70 cubic millimeters of rain. That’s not much by any city’s standards, but Dubai’s drainage system can only handle 35 cubic millimeters. It might be time for an upgrade.

Abdul Majeed Saifaie, director of the Dubai Municipality Drainage and Irrigation Network, told Gulf News that 300 men are working 12-hour shifts to drain the water. His comment got us thinking: is it cheaper for the municipality to deploy underpaid, overworked laborers to shift the water than to upgrade the drainage system?

We know that if the municipality wanted to build something in record time, like a road or bridge, it can and will do it. We’ve seen it happened. So we can only assume that in spite of the many floods we’ve witnessed in Dubai, the municipality has no intention of upgrade the city’s drainage system, otherwise the problem would’ve been sorted by now.

We hope we’re wrong.