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Published: October 4th 2007
View of Bahrain
From the Bovis Lend Lease project officeHow exciting. On the third day of her new job Chelle was taken off to Bahrain by her new company, Bovis Lend Lease.
For those who have not caught up on the most sorry saga, Chelle had a very very bad experience at Turner and Townsend (the company she moved over to Dubai to start work with) and decided that the best thing to do would be to look for a different opportunity in the region). Basically what happened is that she was working with a whole lot of poms and these poms on the Aqua Duyna project in particular seemed to have a slightly different attitude to Chelle in that they were not very proactive and tended to whinge a lot about things. They also didn't seem to have much enthusiasm for their work (unlike poor Chelle who was most excited at the opportunity to work on a theme park). Anyway because of this difference in style the Aqua Dunya team unfortunately started to take actions of Chelle the wrong way and assumed that her enthusiasm and positive nature was in fact an ambitious nature that wanted to make herself look good at their expense to get ahead and
The new sustainable building
with wind turbines in between the two towers! get promoted. This would have probably all been ok except for the fact that a new team member joined the T&T family from Scotland recently. This person was a young and arrogant guy who proceeded to cause conflict and dissent within the team, taking it so far as to actually go around the team and ask the other team members what they didn't like about chelle and then take this all up with the Aqua Dunya Project Director. So instead of people doing the mature thing of trying to sort out any issues that they may have with Chelle on a one to one basis it turned into this big ISSUE and everything fell to pieces. It got even worse when the project director decided that the best way to resolve the matter would be to get Chelle to sit down in a one on one situation with everyone in the team and have the team members basically have a good old bitch at Chelle and tell her everything that they really disliked about her.
Needless to say that after all that Chelle decided that enough was enough and that T&T really wasn't for her. And just to prove
her personal philosphy that everything happens for a reason and that everything works out for the best in the end she has ended up as a regional sustainability manager for Bovis Lend Lease, is getting a lot more money, and is getting to travel a lot for work. So all in all she couldn't be in a better position at the moment.
And on day three of her employment with Bovis she jetted off to Bahrain to see the projects that Bovis are working on over there.
Bahrain was very interesting. It is Ramadan at the moment and Chelle was travelling with an Australian/Lebanese colleague (Ibrahaim) who was fasting. This made things a little harder as it is actually illegal to eat and drink in public in the Bahrain during ramandan (this is the same in the UAE) and therefore all of the restaurants and cafes are closed. Lunch for Chelle therefor consisted of some bread and water, which was consumed in the car on the way to Durrat Al Bahrain.
In Bahrain Bovis are undertaking a few interesting projects. One of them (Durrat Al Bahrain) is actually a very similar project to that of the palms
Map of Bahrain
showing the location of Durrat at the bottom right in Dubai. It is a large reclaimation off the coast for residential purposes. We took a 45 minute drive out there to look at the project and meet the project director so we could talk about sustainability on the project. The great news is that the client is interested in sustainability and that they wish to have some LEED certified buildings on the project. One section of the project may actually have all of its buildings constructed in accordance with LEED - this would be 33 buildings!
From the pictures you can see where this project is located (just off the bottom of Bahrain) and the layout for the project. It looks a bit like fish and hooks doesn't it. Actually they are called petals and atolls. Go figure. Bahrain itself is rather different to Dubai. It is a lot quieter and there is nowhere near the same amount of building going on. Hardly any cranes are in the skyline and Ibs told me that when they do build that there is no coherency about it so that you find five star hotels operating that have no roads up to them, are using septic tanks and generators for their
power supply. A huge new office tower has just been completed that has no parking assosciated with it, and there is no public transport system in Bahrain either.
Although in saying this they are just finishing building a very neat building which is supposedly sustainable by virtue of the fact that it has three large wind turbines between it's two towers that generate electricity for the building. The building also has a double skin to try and shade the building from the direct effects of the sun (check out the photos).
The other most cool thing that Bahrain has are the burial mounds that are by the side of the highway. They are where the Bahraini dead are buried and apparently a lot of the mounds have holes dug into them where grave robbers have stolen from the dead.
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