Post by Bozur on Jan 18, 2006 2:21:20 GMT -5
Mina Journal
Why Mecca's Pilgrims Need Engineering, Not Just Prayer
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
Published: January 17, 2006
MINA, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 15 - In the valley where the devil once roamed, this narrow stretch of holy land, nestled between mountains of basaltic rock, has long bedeviled the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is a duty for devout Muslims.
Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press, for The New York Times
Osama al-Bar, a pilgrimage organizer, near Jamarat Bridge, left, where hundreds have died in stampedes.
Map of the Area
Here, they believe, the devil sought to tempt Abraham into disobeying God as he took his son to be slaughtered, only to be pelted with stones by the prophet. Each year, pilgrims pelt three columns at the site, known as Jamarat, to re-enact the moment in a symbolic rejection of temptation.
But the site, where an imposing two-story overpass was built to carry the waves of pilgrims, has also been the scene of catastrophes. In 1994, 270 were killed in a stampede here. In 2004, 250 were pinned to a wall and died. Last week 363 pilgrims were killed at the entrance to a ramp leading up to the columns, raising fresh calls for a solution to the notoriously dangerous section of the hajj.
Finally, on Sunday, the bulldozers of the Saudi Binladen Group, the engineering and construction company owned by the bin Laden family, rolled in to change all that. (The family, which has disowned Osama bin Laden, spells the company name and family name differently.)
The pedestrian platform will be demolished to make way for a new four-story structure from which pilgrims can carry out the ritual.
"One of the biggest problems was this bridge," said Osama al-Bar, director of the Haj Research Center at Umm al-Qura University, which oversees the safety of the hajj. "After 32 years and 1,500 lives, it's finally going down. I'd really like to know who thought this structure up."
When first built, the bridge was seen as a great leap forward in allowing more pilgrims to pass through Mecca.
By numbers alone, the weeklong pilgrimage is a remarkable spectacle of mass migration. This year, more than 1.5 million pilgrims flew in on more than 3,500 flights; they joined about a million others who had come in by land, and they spent up to $2 billion by some estimates. Those numbers will only increase as the population of the Muslim world rises.
Even the morgue where victims were taken after the Thursday incident reflects the scale of the event, with space for more than 920 bodies in the coolers and a cemetery out back for burying them. Every year, dozens of pilgrims die of natural causes, in car accidents and in other incidents.
Of course, the hajj is not the only event that attracts millions at a time, and other events like the Olympics, a pope's funeral and the New York Marathon are held without catastrophe. Yet what makes the pilgrimage to Mecca so different, Mr. Bar insists, is the logistics involved in moving all those people simultaneously, at set times, along stations spanning 10 miles. Ultimately, it is a study in peak capacity, not average use.
"There's an incident every two years now," said Mr. Bar, who did not hide his frustration after having reviewed hours of videotape from the incident. "When you get 300,000 people seeking to move all at once, accidents are bound to happen, and they are quickly magnified."
Saudi authorities put the blame for the stampede on a rush of unruly pilgrims who insisted on moving at noon, when the stoning ritual begins, rather than spreading their observances over the afternoon.
On Thursday Mr. Bar took a deep breath and stared into the monitors before him in the Mina control room. The room has special indicators connected to systems for measuring the numbers of pilgrims at different locations and to help with crowd control, and other equipment for managing the flow of people.
Thousands of pilgrims had begun gathering in the valley below, and lookouts and cameras stationed in key places watched for the earliest signs of trouble.
But shortly after noon, the crowd jerked forward. In a few minutes, one or two people had fallen on bags that were in front of them, and soon people began falling all along the entrance to the ramp, even as a wave behind them continued to press forward. Voices crackled over the radio, there was shouting and the crowd began to look like a stretched out coil, jerking back and forth as a stampede gained momentum.
An hour and a half later, when the scene was finally under control, bodies had piled in layers up to seven deep and included some of the security guards trying to control the crowd.
After each such incident, Mr. Bar and his team have engineered new solutions.
When fires raged through the tent city at Mina one year, they required fire-retardant canvas for all the tents and banned gas canisters. When hundreds of pilgrims were pinned to the wall at the circular openings where they stoned the columns, Mr. Bar's engineers turned the circles into ellipses, which helped people move through, and widened the pillars into walls, to increase their surface area and make them easier to hit, also helping the pilgrims pass more quickly.
The latest solution has been four years in the making, Mr. Bar said.
"You can never predict the problems of the hajj," he sighed. "At one point it was the flow of people, and we solved it. Then this problem came up. Our job is to keep plugging the holes."
Critics say, however, that Mr. Bar's solutions only compound the problems, focusing on the symptoms, not the actual causes. The most immediate problems entail management, not construction, they say.
"The hajj is a complete system, and must be approached as a system, a flow," said Sami M. Angawi, a prominent architect in Jidda who founded the Haj Research Center in the 1970's. "What they do is concentrate and do a project, and put their hopes on that project until something wrong happens. But all that happens is this project creates new issues."
The latest construction project, costing about $1.8 billion, will upset the flow in other parts of the pilgrimage, Mr. Angawi said.
One floor of the new structure is to be dedicated to absorbing the flow of pilgrims from each end of the valley. Once those pilgrims are done, they all move down together toward the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the next stop, where they will circle the black cube, the shrine called the Kaaba, in an even bigger wave than they do today, he added. The solution this year, in other words, may simply move the problem downstream.
"The three main variables in managing the hajj are density, space and time," he said. "So far all they have been dealing with is space."
At the morgue on Sunday, Imran Mulhaq, from Kerala, India, had come to identify his daughter, who had gone ahead of her father and was killed in the stampede. An elderly man with a gaunt face, he quietly expressed his outrage at the incident, blaming the authorities for mismanagement. But then, in a thoughtful moment, he stopped briefly.
"She is dead now," he said, "but at least she will be buried in this holy place."
Why Mecca's Pilgrims Need Engineering, Not Just Prayer
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
Published: January 17, 2006
MINA, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 15 - In the valley where the devil once roamed, this narrow stretch of holy land, nestled between mountains of basaltic rock, has long bedeviled the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that is a duty for devout Muslims.
Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press, for The New York Times
Osama al-Bar, a pilgrimage organizer, near Jamarat Bridge, left, where hundreds have died in stampedes.
Map of the Area
Here, they believe, the devil sought to tempt Abraham into disobeying God as he took his son to be slaughtered, only to be pelted with stones by the prophet. Each year, pilgrims pelt three columns at the site, known as Jamarat, to re-enact the moment in a symbolic rejection of temptation.
But the site, where an imposing two-story overpass was built to carry the waves of pilgrims, has also been the scene of catastrophes. In 1994, 270 were killed in a stampede here. In 2004, 250 were pinned to a wall and died. Last week 363 pilgrims were killed at the entrance to a ramp leading up to the columns, raising fresh calls for a solution to the notoriously dangerous section of the hajj.
Finally, on Sunday, the bulldozers of the Saudi Binladen Group, the engineering and construction company owned by the bin Laden family, rolled in to change all that. (The family, which has disowned Osama bin Laden, spells the company name and family name differently.)
The pedestrian platform will be demolished to make way for a new four-story structure from which pilgrims can carry out the ritual.
"One of the biggest problems was this bridge," said Osama al-Bar, director of the Haj Research Center at Umm al-Qura University, which oversees the safety of the hajj. "After 32 years and 1,500 lives, it's finally going down. I'd really like to know who thought this structure up."
When first built, the bridge was seen as a great leap forward in allowing more pilgrims to pass through Mecca.
By numbers alone, the weeklong pilgrimage is a remarkable spectacle of mass migration. This year, more than 1.5 million pilgrims flew in on more than 3,500 flights; they joined about a million others who had come in by land, and they spent up to $2 billion by some estimates. Those numbers will only increase as the population of the Muslim world rises.
Even the morgue where victims were taken after the Thursday incident reflects the scale of the event, with space for more than 920 bodies in the coolers and a cemetery out back for burying them. Every year, dozens of pilgrims die of natural causes, in car accidents and in other incidents.
Of course, the hajj is not the only event that attracts millions at a time, and other events like the Olympics, a pope's funeral and the New York Marathon are held without catastrophe. Yet what makes the pilgrimage to Mecca so different, Mr. Bar insists, is the logistics involved in moving all those people simultaneously, at set times, along stations spanning 10 miles. Ultimately, it is a study in peak capacity, not average use.
"There's an incident every two years now," said Mr. Bar, who did not hide his frustration after having reviewed hours of videotape from the incident. "When you get 300,000 people seeking to move all at once, accidents are bound to happen, and they are quickly magnified."
Saudi authorities put the blame for the stampede on a rush of unruly pilgrims who insisted on moving at noon, when the stoning ritual begins, rather than spreading their observances over the afternoon.
On Thursday Mr. Bar took a deep breath and stared into the monitors before him in the Mina control room. The room has special indicators connected to systems for measuring the numbers of pilgrims at different locations and to help with crowd control, and other equipment for managing the flow of people.
Thousands of pilgrims had begun gathering in the valley below, and lookouts and cameras stationed in key places watched for the earliest signs of trouble.
But shortly after noon, the crowd jerked forward. In a few minutes, one or two people had fallen on bags that were in front of them, and soon people began falling all along the entrance to the ramp, even as a wave behind them continued to press forward. Voices crackled over the radio, there was shouting and the crowd began to look like a stretched out coil, jerking back and forth as a stampede gained momentum.
An hour and a half later, when the scene was finally under control, bodies had piled in layers up to seven deep and included some of the security guards trying to control the crowd.
After each such incident, Mr. Bar and his team have engineered new solutions.
When fires raged through the tent city at Mina one year, they required fire-retardant canvas for all the tents and banned gas canisters. When hundreds of pilgrims were pinned to the wall at the circular openings where they stoned the columns, Mr. Bar's engineers turned the circles into ellipses, which helped people move through, and widened the pillars into walls, to increase their surface area and make them easier to hit, also helping the pilgrims pass more quickly.
The latest solution has been four years in the making, Mr. Bar said.
"You can never predict the problems of the hajj," he sighed. "At one point it was the flow of people, and we solved it. Then this problem came up. Our job is to keep plugging the holes."
Critics say, however, that Mr. Bar's solutions only compound the problems, focusing on the symptoms, not the actual causes. The most immediate problems entail management, not construction, they say.
"The hajj is a complete system, and must be approached as a system, a flow," said Sami M. Angawi, a prominent architect in Jidda who founded the Haj Research Center in the 1970's. "What they do is concentrate and do a project, and put their hopes on that project until something wrong happens. But all that happens is this project creates new issues."
The latest construction project, costing about $1.8 billion, will upset the flow in other parts of the pilgrimage, Mr. Angawi said.
One floor of the new structure is to be dedicated to absorbing the flow of pilgrims from each end of the valley. Once those pilgrims are done, they all move down together toward the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the next stop, where they will circle the black cube, the shrine called the Kaaba, in an even bigger wave than they do today, he added. The solution this year, in other words, may simply move the problem downstream.
"The three main variables in managing the hajj are density, space and time," he said. "So far all they have been dealing with is space."
At the morgue on Sunday, Imran Mulhaq, from Kerala, India, had come to identify his daughter, who had gone ahead of her father and was killed in the stampede. An elderly man with a gaunt face, he quietly expressed his outrage at the incident, blaming the authorities for mismanagement. But then, in a thoughtful moment, he stopped briefly.
"She is dead now," he said, "but at least she will be buried in this holy place."