Trucks Are Blocking a Safaga School Gate, and the Governor Has Ordered a Lorry Park Outside Town

Lorries waiting for Safaga's port have spread into the town's residential streets, and the ground outside the gates of Osama Ibn Zaid Primary School has become a truck parking spot, Al-Masry Al-Youm reports, with parents calling for urgent intervention.

The paper reports that trucks and trailers loaded with goods and agricultural produce for export through the port are now parked across several of Safaga's busiest streets and inside the residential block, blocking traffic. Parents and school staff say the vehicles obstruct the school entrance at the start and end of the school day, when young children and their parents are trying to reach the gates, and that heavy vehicles manoeuvring where pupils gather is a risk in itself.

Akram El-Hassan, a parent in Safaga, told the paper the problem is not only traffic: rubbish is piling up wherever the trucks stop, turning the parking spots into informal dumps. Another parent, Asmaa Mohamed, called on the head of Safaga city and the traffic authorities to set designated waiting areas away from school entrances and residential streets, and to act against drivers who block roads or dump waste. Ahmed Ali, an engineer in the town, said the loads are breaking up the asphalt and opening potholes and cracks, and that engine noise and exhaust fumes are keeping residents awake; he asked for heavy trucks to be barred from the city during daytime peak hours, routed away from residential and tourist areas, and given a loading and parking yard outside the built-up area.

Red Sea Governor Walid El-Bargy has ordered executive bodies to move on it: a continuous field presence by Safaga city officials, extra traffic teams to stop heavy vehicles massing in the residential block and main streets, closer coordination with the port so that as many trucks as possible wait inside its yards rather than on public roads, and a new parking yard outside Safaga's built-up area.

The volume behind the queues is not small. Safaga port handled about 2,000 dry and refrigerated containers in a single week, Al-Borsa reports, and on Tuesday alone logged:

• 8 ship movements and 7,000 tonnes of cargo
• 500 trucks and 51 cars
• 776 food shipments exported over the week, more than any other Egyptian port

Neither report gives a date, a location or a cost for the new truck park.