Abstract:

As the Kingdom of Bahrain‘s population and development expands, sewage transport becomes an ever increasing requirement. Trucking the raw sewage plays a major role in the sewer transportation industry and due to the risk associated with this type of transport, a safety evaluation of the practices of this industry was deemed necessary. Site visits to several sewage trucking companies, related authorities and municipalities were conducted alongside distribution of a questionnaire to all the listed trucking companies in the Kingdom in order to gather the required data to perform the evaluation based on selected factors which were deduced from reviewing (international) literature on the subject. Four main factors were selected to form a comprehensive safety assessment model of raw sewage transportation by trucks namely: safety policy compliance, route planning effectiveness, accident management and vehicles reliability. The analysis was then carried out by using the descriptive and quantitative methods to weigh up the compliance to these factors. The study also included a safety mapping section to visualize the outcome of the evaluation of the factors of the safety assessment model. The safety mapping is a new approach in safety analysis. Also, the development and use of indices in analyzing both objective and perceptual questionnaire questions and they represent the main contributions to safety studies.

The conclusions drawn from the study were that the trucking companies with large fleet size uphold the safety principles more than the smaller companies; the trucking companies focus on the needs of their clients and overlook the safety requirements; and a safety assessment model has been suggested in order to evaluate the level of safety performance by the trucking companies. The main recommendation drawn were the developed model can be used as a base to draw up a comprehensive safety compliance check list for raw sewage trucking to be used by the authorities and the trucking companies.