Mammoth Labour city
The major Barwa Al Baraha project will be able to accommodate 53,000 workers upon completion
01 July 2014
BARWA Real Estate Company, a leading real estate and investment company in Qatar, has launched construction work on Package Two of the second phase of Barwa Al Baraha project. The mega development aims to eventually accommodate 53,000 workers, according to a news report.
The construction contract has been awarded to CRC Dorra, a construction and reconstruction engineering company.
The package involves the construction of 32 four-storey buildings with 130 rooms each. There will also be four dining halls, two playgrounds, two mosques, as well as restaurants and utility shops. It will have a capacity to house as many as 24,000 workers, says the local daily Gulf Times.
The concept of Barwa Al Baraha came about in 2008 with an aim of building workers accommodation and the largest truck park in Qatar and the Middle East, says a spokesman for the project.
Studies were then conducted in 2009 that concluded that the strength of the project lies is in its workers accommodation component which will form an integrated workers city constructed in line with the social demand within Qatar.
Barwa Al Baraha is being constructed in two phases over approximately 1.8 million sq m. Phase One, which is now complete, provides Qatar’s largest truck and vehicle parking space with 4,200 spaces for trucks of different sizes.
In January 2012, Barwa laid the foundation stone of Phase Two of Barwa Al Baraha. This phase is divided into three packages. Packages One and Two together offer workers’ accommodation in 64 buildings, each with 130 rooms, as well as dining halls, mosques and restaurants.
Package Three, which will be constructed in the near future, will provide 16 residential buildings for junior and senior staff, each with 97 rooms. The facilities include those for sports, a shopping mall, restaurants, a medical centre and public spaces.
Barwa Al Khor
Work is also progressing on the Barwa Al Khor Shell housing project, which is being built over a 138,000-sq-m area for Shell’s employees in Qatar.
The news of its progress comes as the project has achieved over 5 million man-hours without a lost time incident, says QPM, the client representative for the project.
A team from Shell recently visited the site and expressed its pleasure on the progress made on site in terms of construction and HSE (health, safety and environment). Shell has committed to fund Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) Working Safely training for the contractor safety team.
Alan Crawford, head of HSE at QPM, says: “This is a wonderful result for our HSE team who have worked very hard to build awareness of safety issues across the project’s breadth including contractors and workers at every level. Lost time incidents are significant not because of the loss in productivity, but because any injury, big or small, is something that must be avoided.”
Barwa Al Khor Shell housing is also part of a future masterplan for the Al Khor region. The residential component of the project currently extends over an area of 25,599 sq m comprising 50 villas, 300 three-bedroom units distributed across 15 five-level apartment buildings and 87,557 sq m of gross floor area.
The Shell housing compound in Al Khor is custom-built with high quality design features and a wealth of amenities.
Crawford comments: “This type of partnership where a large organisation recognises and rewards the efforts of contractors is exactly what’s needed if we are to improve health and safety in Qatar.
“We are working on developing a cultural shift in general contractor mentality in addition to regularly reinforced awareness drives to emphasise the human factor in safety. The initial task has been to make safety the centre of the contractor’s management progress objectives. At Barwa Al Khor Shell housing, we have also succeeded in enhancing the actual management of HSE factors on site through greater accountability of contractor site managers in addition to HSE inspectors.”
Barwa has so far constructed 4.42 million sq m of projects within and outside Qatar. It has released over 13,568 residential and commercial units. Among them are 5,979 residential units in Barwa City, more than 1,994 residential units in Masaken Mesaimeer and Al Sailiya, 1,381 commercial and residential units in Barwa Village, as well as Barwa Al Sadd which provides three office towers, a hotel, 261 apartments and 10 retail utilities.
