Why littering culture is rife

Readers call for more rubbish bins in shopping malls and on roadsides. Other topics: driving, fire safety, domestic abuse

Readers call for installing more rubbish bins at malls and on the roadside. Christopher Pike / The National

I refer to the article Let's change the culture of littering (January 25). In most European cities, you have rubbish bins every few hundred metres on street-light poles and in malls. Go in any mall or any street here and count the number of bins. Obviously educating people is important, but you need infrastructure as well.

Tilo Soueu, Abu Dhabi

It was sickening to go to beaches in Dubai and watch families leave all of their leftover food from the barbecue on the sand.

Barbara Radwan-Wiehe, Dubai

This is in reference to the news report Call to get tough on litterbugs (January 24). People do not think before littering, whether in a park or in the desert.

On one occasion, I saw a family that came to the desert for a barbecue leaving behind heaps of rubbish. They even left the campfire burning.

Finally, we put out the fire and collected the rubbish ourselves to dispose of them in a bin.

These litterbugs should be penalised. Their parents seem not to care. I find it disturbing when children sometimes litter and destroy plants in front of their parents.

A Elshafei, Dubai

How hard is it to use a hands-free while driving?

I hate the practice of fiddling with a mobile phone while driving (Use a phone while driving in Dubai and have car confiscated, January 28). I am sure half of the drivers do this. An earphone for a mobile can be found cheaply, while most popular mobiles have it included in the box. No excuses.

Nicola Siotto, Dubai

I recently spotted a driver on his mobile in my rearview mirror. He was on it for a long time. I say these irresponsible drivers must be charged severely. Impounding vehicles is old school.

Arjuna De Alwis, Dubai

Given the atrocious number of road deaths caused by thoughtless, careless drivers, this is a good recommendation. However, I’m afraid that some drivers will find a way to get around this penalty, as they do with most laws.

Ian Robertson, Dubai

Crucial issues over fire safety

The article, The 10 big burning legal questions of The Address Downtown Dubai fire (January 25), was spot on. It clearly and accurately discussed the key issues.

The NFPA 285 test is a critical one since it measures fire spreading up the face of a building. You might also look into the design of the fire protection sprinkler system. Pre-fire photos show sprinklers in the hotel interior, which are required, but not on the balcony ceilings. Sprinklers are not normally placed on the exterior (since they would be a problem in colder temperatures), but in this case they might have protected the non-fire resistant cladding at the balcony ceiling until the fire could be contained.

Usually hotel rooms and apartments have sprinklers and heat and smoke detectors, which you will see in pre-fire PR photos. All of these systems are normally designed to automatically set off the fire alarm and strobe light system and to return all the elevators to the ground floor for Civil Defence use if fire or smoke is detected or water is flowing in the sprinkler system.

The exterior fire clearly spread inside and I would have expected that after the first five or 10 minutes all of the fire alarm system would have been sounding and automatic alarms sent to Civil Defence.

The building system computers log all of that. So there should be records of how and when the alarm was received and how the building systems reacted.

Name withheld by request

Enact laws on domestic abuse

There definitely should be a law to protect women from domestic abuse, if not for themselves but for the impact such behaviour has on their children (Domestic issues are not always private, January 26). If children witness beatings and confinement within the family home they might consider this to be the norm, such that when they get married they repeat the same behaviour. History has a habit of repeating itself. Many of the current domestic-abuse cases in the UK occur where one or both parties involved had been brought up in domestically violent households.

Name withheld by request