Fire, fire,...

Yesterday's Arab Times had this snippet...

Fireman late, room destroyed: A room of a house in east Sulaibikhat was totally
gutted due to delay in the arrival of firefighters who lost their way, reports
Al-Watan daily. It is reported that names and numbers of this area have not
given yet and the fire service department has no information about the addresses
of the area.

This reminds me of the article Mark posted on his blog, when even after the firemen arrived at the site of the fire, it took them half an hour before they were in a position to do battle against the flames. Then he wrote about another fire 10 days later.

Just as well we didn’t have a house fire when we were living in Hutteen, South Surra. In fact, tough luck if you happen to live in South Surra full stop. Still no street numbers, and houses have been there for up to 7 years! Pizza or other fast food delivery places refused to call on us even though our house was easy to find. We were on a main road – the 206, you can’t miss the place… uh uh.

It was a nightmare getting furniture delivered. The problem is that the guys that do this kind of stuff, and it doesn’t seem to differ whether or not they have a working knowledge of English or Arabic, just have no clue when it comes to directions. Draw them a map – forget it, they can’t read maps. Mention main road numbers, 40, 50, 206… nope, they don’t use them. The best you can aim for is them finding a landmark in the suburb, in our case it was often the KFH, and then going to find them to bring them to our place. You could say take first left, first right then continue on this road ‘til you see red villa on the corner with palm trees outside, but they either still managed to get lost, or weren’t confident of not getting lost and wouldn’t budge until you found them. Only in Kuwait! So you can imagine what it would be like if there was a fire.