Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Another construction site death.

What a bad few days this has been for construction workers. The roof collapse, the tower fire, now scaffolding collapse.

One worker dead and two seriously injured, the reports say, when scaffolding they were standing on collapsed. This was on a thirteen storey building in Al Nahda, behind Sahara Centre.


Photo. Asghar Khan/Gulf News

There are suggestions that vibrations from digging for cable-laying nearby might have been the cause. That's another thing for the authorities to investigate.

There's an obvious need for safety standards to be imposed on construction sites as a matter of extreme urgency. The two injured workers are said to have escaped death because they had their safety belts on.

I suppose there are two positives to have come out of the recent tragedies. One is the spotlight that's been focused on safety issues. Hopefully this will mean less accidents in the future.

The other is that the companies involved have been quick to offer compensation to the families of the victims and to injured workers. The company involved in this latest incident say they will cover the medical bills, no wages of workers undergoing medical treatment will be cut and the dead worker's family will be compensated. He was only 25.



Gulf News story: Scaffolding collapse kills worker.

4 comments:

trailingspouse said...

Did you see the story in 7 Days yesterday about the plan to ensure all buildings under construction have a fire safety officer? They mean to say that isn't already a requirement? Wow.

Seabee said...

I wonder what the qualifications will be? They'll probably be poorly paid labourers with the fancy title of Fire Safety Officer so there's someone at the bottom of the heap to conveniently blame if there's a fire.

Anonymous said...

hi... well sadly speaking this building is been constructed right beside my apartment,the area mention was nahda but is it muhaisnah 4, al ghusais.

Anonymous said...

My brother worked as a Safety Officer on a construction site. There was an accidental death of a labourer but my brother who was nowhere near the accident was made personally responsible for the incident. What happened to corporate responsibility? The name of the company is Becon Construction. He is languishing in jail now as he cannot pay the "blood money" being asked for!