Poor Planning Lands Arabs in Deep Shit

Raw sewage threat to booming Dubai

Despite boasting several fancy shaped islands that are visible from space, a sail-shaped hotel, an indoor ski slope with real snow and a new city every day, the planners (for this whole false paradise of un-sustainability has actually been planned, don’t forget!) have forgotten to plan for all the shit that inevitably arrives when airplane-loads of tourists and cheap Pakistani and Phillipino workers arrive to service the whole ferago.

This is not metaphorical shit alluding to the sexual antic of visitors, no, this is real shit.  The smelly stuff.

Apparently, they only have one sewage works.

So even though Arabs have a host of rules and modes of etiquette for bodily functions and eating at mealtimes -like most cultures – and are actually very hygenic – and, like the Great Leslie, their clothes are always clean and white – and even though their water shortages are solved with massive desalination plants or by dragging icebergs from Antarctica – and even though they have more than enough money to actually make and pay for a new sewage works for every city –

– they haven’t actually done it.

Why?  One has to wonder.

All the Dubai Offshore Sailing Club do about it is trail lorry drivers in the dead of night, and then whinge about it.  The men in white, well they seem to wash their hands of the problem, and me, I think it’s crap.

All it proves is; that the discarding of waste is low down on their priorities; that they exist in a culture of massive resource consumption; and that the provision of a veneer of splendour is their top priority.

If they don’t act fast, their little blue oasis will very soon turn a nice shade of greenish-brown…  You’d think that people would learn from the mistakes of the West.