The Poop on Trucking in Dubai

I have two friends with truck driving experience, one retired due to health issues directly related to the job and the other soon to be exchanging the life of a trucker for island life in the Bahamas, and I wondered what their take would be on this stuff I read about trucking poop in Dubai. Here goes.

In Dubai, particularly, but also in India and other places (not the US), there are high rising skyscrapers, sometimes 140 to 150 stories tall, that are not connected to any municipal infrastructure, and by this I mean no sewer system. In this country that we assume we can plug into an urban system that can handle whatever waste the populace of the building produces and we do. Apparently in these fast growing, and even faster modernizing cities, using the most sophisticated architects and engineers in the world, you can design and build a building of 140 or 150 stories, but designing and building a municipal network of sewage treatment to support that building is more complex? Hopefully that question mark indicates how puzzling this seems to me. Maybe they have the wrong architects and engineers or the planners are just superficial, but it seems pretty surprising to me that one would design superstructures without infrastructure. So in Dubai, what do they do with the sewage? They use trucks to take it out of individual buildings and then they wait in line, often for 24 hours at a time, to take a dump their load into a waste water treatment plant.

So I asked my two friends about this and here is what they said:

First my Bahama bound, soon to no longer be a truck driver, friend referred me to a video clip on You Tube, a documentary about West African Truckers that highlights the disparities between the trucking industry here and trucking in third world countries where drivers spend days, weeks, and sometimes months dealing with corrupt border officials and illegal checkpoints on delivery trips. Though this info wasn't specifically about poop trucking it did bring home the lack of regulation, and what many in this country would find unacceptable, is an accepted norm in third world countries. Basically what I think is crazy, trucking poop from skyscrapers, is pretty common place in, not only Dubai, but also in lots of other places and is one more indicator of how good we have it in this country.  

Next, I quote my retired truck driving friend and these are his thoughts about poop trucking and waiting in line for 24 hours to unload, Here trucks that remove and deliver sewage from septic tanks to treatment plants are called honey dippers, but I don’t know what they would call them there. Sounds like a (expletive deleted but you can guess what went here) job from start to finish. Line that slow, seems like they could use a laxative or an enema.

Enough said.