City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (38 page)

Reckless driving is a part of life in the Gulf. There are mentalities at play that make the roads among the world’s most dangerous. One is a self-important “me first” attitude; the second is the belief that safety is in God’s hands. Seifert knew this. But he chose to drive in the treacherous fast lane, despite the fog. He kept his speed under seventy-five miles an hour, rather than his usual eighty-five. Even in the heavy fog, cars cruising at a hundred pulled up to his rear bumper, flashing their headlights and forcing him over to pass. The only precaution most drivers took was putting on their emergency flashers.

Seifert figured that he was safer coping with the sharks in the fast lane than the trucks and laborers’ buses in the slow lanes. Overloaded trucks typically creep along while the buses barrel at high speed. If he was going to be rear-ended, he would prefer a Toyota Land Cruiser to a bus. It turned out to be his only wise decision.

“I thought about pulling over. But I just decided to go for it,” Seifert says. “It was like flying blind.”

About 7:45 a.m., Seifert was nearing the overpass for Ghantoot, a beach resort near Abu Dhabi’s border with Dubai. A car materialized out of the fog directly in front of him. The car was turned slightly to the right. He didn’t have time to realize the car was stopped. He couldn’t see that its front end was smashed into the car in front of it, or that that car was also smashed into the preceding car. In fact, the entire highway was blocked by dozens of smashed cars hidden under the fog. Seifert had no chance. Just as his reflexes were telling him to brake, his Peugeot 307 buried its nose full force into the stopped car. The effect was like a bomb detonating. First the impact, then Seifert’s air bag slammed him back into his seat, wrenching his head. The front end ripped open. The car caromed and spun. When it stopped, the young German flailed at the air bag, batting it away from his face so he could see. His car had spun 180 degrees. He was still in the fast lane, but now facing oncoming traffic.

The fog that swirled around him was darkening with arabesques of smoke. In the next lane, a driver climbed out of his wreck and ran, head down, for the roadside. Seifert peered into the fog. He was next in line
for a smashing. Should he climb out and run? No chance. The white headlights and yellow flashers bore down on him. There was a brief scream of tires. He clenched. The head-on smash fisted him, throwing his little car back into the wreck he’d just hit. Glass and debris geysered into the sky and rained down on his car, which was now turned to the side, a flank still exposed to the road. Then it came: Slam! Another wrenching crush pounded his new Peugeot. Again he was thrown back. Now he was hemmed in by wrecks on all sides. He could see drivers going through the same experience he’d just had. Then a car walloped the rear of the first car that hit him, whiplashing his neck a fourth time. Seifert groped for the latch, kicked the door open, and ran for his life. He leaped over the guardrail and crouched like a fugitive behind a lamppost.

The surreal horrors continued. Every few seconds, a blind-driven car or bus added itself to the pileup. He could hear the moans of the injured, the screams of the terrified, and the screeching, thundering crashes. The air was thick with burning rubber and roasting paint. Ash and debris showered from the sky. After a while it was quiet. The German looked at his hands and then ran them over his head and body and then looked at them again. He checked every inch of himself for blood or broken bones. Each time he looked at his hands they were clean. He found his cigarettes, took one out, and lit it. He was fine.

Others weren’t. Seifert wandered from car to car. He saw mashed wrecks, twisted chassis, vans aflame. There was a car like his crushed into a cube between two buses. Some he couldn’t identify. They’d been pummeled into crullers of scrap, with a wheel poking out here, a tailpipe there. He saw wounded people and corpses. Men were breaking car and bus windows to rescue those trapped. A group gathered on the pavement looking at the ground. A man lay there, his limbs crushed under a bus. Mercifully, he was dead.

Seifert was glad he’d driven in the fast lane. The buses, notorious for their reckless drivers, had caused the most damage. The buses had ripped open like cracker boxes. But the cars they’d rear-ended were the worst off. Many were aflame.

As the fog lifted, the mile-long pileup materialized like a Polaroid photograph. About 80 cars, trucks, and buses lay strewn together, some of them on fire, some of them already burnt husks, some with emergency flashers blinking inanely. All told, 250 vehicles crashed on their way from Abu Dhabi to Dubai that day. There were several pockets of wrecks along
the road. The pileup at the Ghantoot bridge was the biggest. The first police car arrived on the scene half an hour after Seifert crashed. The officer stepped out of his car, glanced around, then got back in and drove off.

The walking wounded were a slice of cosmopolitan Dubai: Emirati nationals in blood-spattered
kandouras
, limping Filipino and Indian laborers in blue coveralls, Western managers in dress shirts and ties. Police put the official death toll at four. Hospitals reported 8. Seifert thinks initial news estimates of twenty-five to thirty dead are closer to the truth. Nearly 350 people suffered injuries.

A second police officer arrived, telling milling laborers to get away from the wrecked cars. The officer warned that looters were combing the wrecks. Seifert checked his car for valuables. Nearby, two men linked arms and carried a wounded Indian man, his head and bare foot wrapped in gauze, and put him in the back seat of a police cruiser.

Emergency crews had their hands full sorting out the biggest road disaster in UAE history, a situation they’d never prepared for, nor one that could’ve been imagined a few years earlier. Seifert was stuck on the highway for seven hours. He walked up to the source of the pileup. There, he saw a white Toyota van without major damage to its front end. It had been rear-ended by a white Mercedes. Was this the crash that started it? Seifert thought his assessment was more thorough than that of the police. They simply pushed the battered vehicles to the roadside without trying to sort out the cause.

Why did it happen? UAE officials were quick to blame the weather. One absurd headline in the progovernment
Gulf News
summed up the initial reaction: “Need to Tackle the Fog Problem.” Gregor McClenaghan, a British reporter with the Abu Dhabi newspaper
The National
, offered a more realistic assessment. “The reason it happened is because people here drive like fucking idiots.”

McClenaghan, too, commutes every day between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Lucky for him, he drives the other way. He saw the crash spooling past his window, with laborers at the roadside waving rags to warn him. He saw the smoke and then the walls of flame roasting the fronds of the date palms on the median. “I started talking to myself. ‘This is insane. I should get off the road.’”

Bill Spindle,
The National’s
business editor, also drove to Dubai that day. He left at 9:00 a.m., as the fog lifted, and gawked at the carnage
that stretched for miles. Spindle, a forty-six-year-old American, counted five separate pileups as he wove through the burnt-out husks and the roadside triage, the sirens, the stumbling victims, the highway covered in oil and glass and, at one point, pickles. The pickles had dumped from an overturned van and workers were sluicing thousands of them to the roadside with a board. It was worse than anything he’d seen in Baghdad. It was the grimmest disaster he’d seen, in fact, since the day he watched a 747 plow into the World Trade Center.

Driving in Dubai and the rest of the UAE is blood sport for some young men. A crash happens, on average, every two minutes.
²
The rate of fatalities is among the world’s highest. Each day three people die in UAE traffic wrecks,
³
two of them killed by reckless drivers. The carnage is a public health crisis on par with a serious outbreak of plague or smallpox. Crashes are responsible for about 15 percent of all deaths in Dubai and the rest of the Gulf region, the biggest killer after heart disease.
⁴
In neighboring Abu Dhabi, where driving is arguably worse than Dubai, road wrecks are already the leading cause of death.
⁵
All told, more than 1,000 people died in UAE car crashes in 2007, an increase of nearly 200 over 2006.

It’s amazing the death toll isn’t higher. Cars pinball across six-lane highways at 100 miles per hour. When drivers lose control, their vehicles might tumble end over end, spewing wheels and bits of taillight and windshield. Sometimes they mount the highway’s median barrier and take out cars in the oncoming lane. The authorities have stepped up fines for reckless driving, but the pace of infrastructure expansion and Dubai’s 12 percent yearly growth in vehicle numbers have overwhelmed their efforts. In April 2008, a spate of accidents killed 21 people in 72 hours.
⁶

For fresh arrivals, especially those accustomed to the tame American and European roads, driving is a shock. Shirley Morrison, a forty-year-old South African who heads Executive Expatriate Relocations, helps the newly arrived get used to it. Some companies, like British oil firm BP, insist that staff take defensive driving courses.

“I advise people to get into a car as soon as possible and start to drive,” says Morrison. “The longer you leave it the harder it is, especially
for women. When you leave it too long, you see what it’s like on the roads, and then you fear it more.”

At Dubai’s Gulf Traffic Convention in 2005, a video showed dozens of children orphaned by traffic wrecks marching in Abu Dhabi. The children wore black mourning robes, and some carried banners reading, “They were killed by speed.”

“We lost our fathers,” the children chanted. “Why didn’t he go slowly?”

Young Emirati men, known for aggressive driving, appear to be among the chief culprits—and victims. Across the UAE, more Emirati men are killed in road accidents than by any other cause.
⁷
It’s common to hear Emiratis speak of sons or relatives lost in crashes. Jonathan Somcio, a thirty-three-year-old Dubai police paramedic who makes a living extracting the dead and injured from their vehicles, says most of the people he tends to are Emirati and Arab men in their twenties and early thirties, along with those driving labor buses and vans, generally Indian and Pakistani men.
⁸

Many more would be dying if it weren’t for air bags and improved safety equipment. In Somcio’s homeland of the Philippines, most folks drive older cars. People die from crashes that Dubaians walk away from. “Sometimes we find the driver standing at the side of the road, still able to walk. It’s surprising,” he says.

The UAE’s plague of high-risk driving is a by-product of a traditional culture beset by breakneck modernization. In a society that frowns on dating and, ironically, drinking alcohol, young men seek arousal from driving fast. The huge number of 4x4s and trucks on the roads contributes to the high death rate, since bigger vehicles cause bigger injuries. In a study of crashes in the city of Al Ain, Emiratis made up more than 60 percent of those hospitalized, despite forming around 20 percent of the population. More than 75 percent were male.
⁹

“Young people use their cars for competition and passing time in late afternoon and evenings, which, incidentally, is the time when most of the casualties occur,” write public health researchers Abdulbari Bener and David Crundall. In the United Arab Emirates, there are 116 deaths per 100,000 vehicles, six times the U.S. rate and ten times that of Britain, according to the pair’s research at the University of Nottingham in England.
¹⁰

Bad driving is a knotty problem. There is little road enforcement beyond cameras that monitor the fast lane. Worse, reckless driving is a matter of pride. “Drift” racing is one scourge of the roadway, with young men racing each other to destinations around the city, sometimes videotaping their careening runs through heavy traffic. Type “Dubai accident” or “Dubai drift” on YouTube and scores of clips turn up, including a couple of horrific crashes in Dubai’s tunnels. One shows a policeman getting run down while investigating a disabled car. Another shows a speeding car trying to zoom between two slower vehicles without the space to do it. The speeder’s car and those of his two victims spin and slam into the tunnel walls.

Young men speak of their crashes with pride, bragging about the number of cars they’ve “canceled.” Ignoring seat belts is also a badge of honor, common in Arab countries. One afternoon, I send my Emirati assistant, a woman in her twenties, on an errand to buy some books. “Drive carefully,” I tell her.

“Inshallah,”
she says, which means “God willing.”

A colleague tells her: “Wear your seat belt.”

She replies in a noncommittal singsong. “I’m a
Mowatina”
—a local—“I don’t wear the seat belt. I pray that I will get there safely.”

This exchange might be funny, except that the young woman lost four aunts in a single accident.

Enforcement of the law in Dubai depends on who is breaking it. Here is how Dubai FAQs, an unofficial Web site for newly arrived expatriates, explains traffic law: