ACCORDING to this very newspaper, the Civil Defense teams in a southern border village have rescued a pregnant woman from the floods which overflowed her home. The teams took the woman in a forklift and dropped her on the other side of the valley where she gave birth to her child immediately afterwards. We really appreciate the Civil Defense teams for this gallant work but who knows with our continuous predicament with the rains and floods, a large number of babies may open their eyes in forklifts. These children may be our hope for the future to resolve our deep-rooted complex with the basic infrastructure. This is a big problem which has no justifications whatsoever and which is not at all suitable to a country like the Kingdom with huge potential and high ambitions. On the same day, Okaz published a painful interview with the father of a young man who died after his car plunged into an open ditch in Al-Rihaili neighborhood in Makkah. The deep ditch was filled to the brim with stagnant water. The contractor, who was executing a project inside the district, left the huge ditch open after he had stopped work on the project midway. Neither the municipality nor the Saudi Water Company or anyone else was able to compel the contractor to fix his mistake despite numerous complaints from the residents. The divers, who went down the ditch looking for the dead body of the young man, had to take injections to protect them against the numerous diseases that might be caused by the stagnant water. This means that the Health Ministry, which should have warned against the health hazards that might be caused by the open ditch, never cared. It seems that the ministry, until this moment, does not heed the mistakes of the other ministries. It, rather, prefers to focus on its own mistakes. We need from our young government to use the largest forklift in the world to demolish all the neat glass offices which have tampered with the basic infrastructure in several regions. The feeble results of the work of these offices are not commensurate with the high costs of the development projects. Subsequently, safety and quality of the basic infrastructure should be made a top priority to proceed with the recently unveiled ambitious economic and development plans. Without the availability of a giant forklift, the road toward a different future will not be passable. Our huge ambitions may submerge in a small ditch which should never have existed at all had we cared for the safety of the basic infrastructural projects.
