Saturday, Sep 13, 2008

Abu Dhabi: It's Friday morning and this is your chance to sleep in, but the hammering pounding of construction sites wakes you up at 6am and you can't press the snooze button.

Annoyed, you toss and turn and try to cover your ears with the pillow, but the vibrating sounds of construction seep through to your nerves.

You blame the rest of your day on a bad start and the Abu Dhabi wakeup call.

Although they may have a permit to operate early, residents who live next to various construction sites explain the turmoil of noise.

Majid Hilal, a father of a newborn child, was left with little option after taking his complaint higher.

"The construction site was working in the dead of night and on holidays," said Hilal. "They were even not stopping at the time of Adan and prayer and the mosque is just five metres away from the site.

"I, on behalf of other tenants of 24 apartments of our building talked to the site engineer and made a written complaint to change the working timing, which was making a huge noise since the jobs included fixing and dismantling of scaffoldings.

"I had a newborn baby at home who was not able to sleep even ten minutes continuously due to the noise," he added.

He met with the organisers and was promised that "decent" hours of work would be respected, however, the promise was short-lived.

"For one week they followed the agreement they made and broke it after a week," he said. "One early morning at 4.30am, we all got up due to the heavy noise and called one of the signatories of the agreement who was sleeping at that time.

Psychological impact

Hilal was left with little option than to try to tune out the construction noise. The psychological impact of noise is irrefutable - not merely on the ear-drums - but for a person's sanity.

The regulations on working hours in the morning, at night and on holidays are clearly laid out, but residents complain that while construction sites may operate within the parameters of the law, they need to take into account their surroundings.

A construction site on Reem Island, for example, should have different hours of operation from those of a construction site in the middle of the city surrounded by private homes.

letter2editor@gulfnews.com

© Gulf News 2008. All rights reserved.

 

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