Fire and Safety Discussions: Best Practice

In this series of articles, we’ll break down every panel discussion at the Fire Middle East Conference 2024! Learn the highlights and moments that made the event such a ground-breaking success. 

The Fire Middle East Conference opened its doors to over 200 C-suite decision-makers from across the Fire and Safety industries. This audience then participated and interacted with various panel discussions. These thought leaders sat down on stage and answered pressing questions, aimed to challenge them and produce key insights about the state of the industry, the coming Saudi Vision 2030 initiative and the new wave of innovative technologies.

The first panel discussion of the day was moderated by the longtime editor of Fire Middle East Magazine, Wendy Otway. She took to the stage, and briefly discussed the importance of best practices and how they are consistently developing, Wendy then invited her fellow panellists onstage:

Mohammed Aldajani – Fire Protection Engineering Consultant
Mustafa Alfakih – Associate Fire Protection Engineer: Jensen Hughes
Murtada Aldarweesh – CEO, Fire & Life Safety Consultant: MAD Consultants

The first half of the discussion was focused on the different roles within best practices, including how government bodies and large-scale projects interact with consultants and contractors in the field to deliver innovative construction designs, Mohammed Aldajani and Murtada Aldarweesh discussed how consultants and contractors are curated over time, eventually being at a high enough quality to be used for governmental projects – with low-quality results being completely dismissed, as to further strengthen the infrastructure and projects within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Murtada Aldarweesh added: “This is all about the approval process, The Civil Defence door is open to any consultant. They can get guidance on how they meet the expectations from Civil Defence, this will ensure the project is a good, and safe project, and then they have that trust.”

Mustafa Alfakih looked at the process from all sides, recognising that business owners want projects to be done quickly. “There is a lot of responsibility that lies on the business owner. There are a lot of requirements to comply with. But if you aren’t in line with those requirements, it’s just going to delay even more.”

Rounding off on the importance of triple-checking projects, teamwork between entities, and standardization of codes and compliance, Mohammed commented: “The public and private sector should work together to maintain all these tasks. I believe that by 2030 everyone will be happy except the consultants who make a mistake!”

Want to have an in-depth look at the day’s events? Catch the full 2024 gallery by clicking here.