The Mayor's Office has closed down 29 bottled water factories in Jeddah for producing water unfit for human consumption. The companies also face fines of up to SR5,000. Officials from the mayoralty's Department of Licensing and Commercial Monitoring (DLCM) said Wednesday they discovered high levels of bacteria in bottled water following the analysis of 97 samples taken from the sites in on-the-spot inspections during the months of January and February this year. Bashir Abu Najm, head of the LCMD, said that regulation violations observed at the factories included a lack of laboratory technicians, failures in the purification process, failures to apply automatic bottling, a lack of health and safety staff, poor storage, defective bottling processes, and breaches of bottling specifications. “Also noted were instances of staff who did not have required health cards and non-compliance with official uniform regulations, as well as poor levels of hygiene and general cleanliness,” he said. According to Abu Najm, the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs only grants licenses to operators with sufficient factory-floor space for their productions, as well as ventilation, cleaning and hand-washing facilities. “Storage tanks must be kept away from any possible source of contamination,” he said. Abu Najm said that on the discovery of contaminated samples all quantities of water seized are disposed of and the company in question faces fines of up to SR5,000 and closure until the site and its equipment have been properly sterilized. “Factories may only reopen once new samples have been analyzed to confirm it meets health standards,” Abu Najm said.
