The worst thing about Tuesday's horrific accident in Abu Dhabi is not the number of dead and injured. It is the lack of a reliable system that could have prevented it from happening on that foggy day and the days to follow.
In his visit to the Ghantoot accident victims in Al Rahba Hospital, Lieutenant General Shaikh Saif Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister of Interior, said he hopes no accident similar to this happens again.
I have full confidence that the Ministry of Interior will try to learn from this accident and improve the way it functions under similar circumstances in the future. But, I must emphasise that fog as a weather phenomenon is not new to the UAE.
For all the technology the UAE has invested in, to improve road safety, almost nothing has been done to tackle this problem.
Apart from illuminating most of the roads linking the main cities in the country, there is nothing that can provide early warning to motorists about the conditions on the road ahead of them, including the degree of visibility and the proper speed they should drive their vehicles in poor climate conditions like fog.
Such investments should not be avoided as fog is not a once-a-year occurrence, on which a public holiday can be declared, like during the rain storms that lashed the country a few weeks ago. There is no excuse for ignoring this problem anymore because it is persistent and occurs frequently throughout the year.
On average, visibility on highways drops to few feet during the night and in the early hours of morning for more than 60 days of the year - nearly 20 per cent of the nights in every year. It affects different parts of the roads in all the emirates.
What had made the Tuesday incident so dramatic is the fact that the volume of traffic between Abu Dhabi and Dubai has increased many folds in recent years. The road has become busy, day and night, throughout the year. The second reason for the unprecedented public attention on last week's accident is that people in the UAE are now better equipped than ever before. Most of the commuters have high resolution cameras in their pockets and can dispense news immediately from their mobile phones and through the internet.
In the past, I myself covered different fog accidents for Gulf News, including horrific pile-ups that occurred in the early hours of the day in a part of what was then called the Abu Dhabi highway, in the section between Al Safa Park and Jebel Ali. The worst one I can recall is an accident in late 1980s, in which more than 400 cars were involved in and more than 100 people injured. Two were killed.
Similar scenes
The 20-kilometre stretch of the highway was turned into a graveyard for cars, very similar to the scenes we saw near Ghantoot on Tuesday. All the accidents happened in less than half an hour, and the majority of those living on the same road before Al Safa Park did not even hear about this until the next day.
That is because there was no internet, and the one or two FM radio stations available at the time were just meant to broadcast music and entertainment programmes. Mobile phone users in the country were less than 10,000, compared with the nearly 8 million lines that are now in service.
Back to the fog: the UAE is not unique in experiencing thick levels of fog that reduce visibility to less than 3 feet. The phenomenon prevails in almost every country with different levels of intensity. But the fact is that we might be unique, in the sense that we have zero defences against the phenomenon.
I have a very simple experience that could help the police in the UAE to prevent such a disaster in the future. Twenty five years ago, I was driving my car from Madinah to Makkah in Saudi Arabia. It was just after dawn, and the visibility was normal. I noticed that the right lane of the dual carriageway was blocked by a long queue of vehicles moving at about 30k/hr. Being tired and wanting to reach my destination as soon as I could, and not knowing the reason why the vehicles were queuing in such a funny way while the fast lane was open, I decided to take over the queue and drive my car at a higher speed.
One kilometre ahead, I heard the police patrol in the front ordering me to stick to the queue. I obeyed reluctantly, thinking there could be an official motorcade in front of us and that we have to be kept away for security reasons.
A few kilometres later, thick fog engulfed the police patrol and the convoy it was leading, including my car. Only the powerful emergency lights on top of the police patrol enabled the motorists in the convoy to get a sense of the direction and follow the police driver.
We drove at a low speed for 20 kilometres, till the fog cleared, and the patrol pulled aside to wish the motorists a safe journey through the loudspeaker.
Assessment
If we can apply this simple but reliable technique every time fog becomes a problem during driving; or if we can provide traffic information along the road to inform drivers about the situation well in advance including the speed limit they must maintain to pass through foggy areas, accidents like the one on Tuesday could always be avoided.
We can blame errant drivers, or say that it was the destiny and bad luck of those who found themselves trapped in the middle of the fog in Ghantoot. But with a little evaluation and assessment of the situation, we must conclude that the police have not done enough to prevent such accidents, although there were many accidents in the past that should have warned us about even worse ones to come.
The Tuesday incident will not be the last and the worst - if we do not act immediately.
