They travel as a group, limping from one hospital to another. The survivors of Sunday’s Al Ain bus crash are searching for friends and colleagues, even as they struggle with their deep sense of shock.

“I have been to Al Ain Hospital, Al Noor and Al Jimi hospitals, looking for my friends, but nobody knows and they are not in the morgue,” says Rahmat Ali, who escaped death when a truck carrying concrete bricks ploughed into the minibus ferrying him and his colleagues to work for an interior design firm. At least 22 of Ali’s co-workers were killed in the horror smash.

Ali and four colleagues who were released from Al Ain hospital have been wandering like ghosts through hospital wards, looking for survivors.

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At least 22 workers were killed when the lorry and its load of bricks fell on to the bus

“I am still in shock,” he said. “I was given medicine by the hospital and we have some insurance but we still don’t feel this is real.” The number of labourers killed in bus crashes has never been measured in Health Authority Abu Dhabi studies, but other research shows that Asian men are far more likely to be the victims of crashes than other people.

In her Abu Dhabi office, Sophie Malie is sorting through the paperwork from another disaster.

During thick fog in 2010, a bus carrying workers from her recruitment firm crashed and overturned and the bus was dragged along the road by a truck. More than 25 workers were killed.

“There has been a bit of a dispute about payments,” said Malie, who has been dealing with the case, along with other work, for more than a year. “It involves insurance companies and our company and the people the men were working for.

“It can be very complicated.”

In the latest tragedy, the men were insured and they are hopeful their hospital stays will be covered by Daman, the insurer for their employer, Hakeem Decorations. The men said that they pay 20 per cent of the cost for their medicine, although that might be reimbursed. Their employer, Mustapha Al Hakeem, was at the hospital for days, trying to figure out how many were dead and what the procedure is for dealing with the dead and injured.

“There is so much to do, we are trying to deal with it day by day,” he said. “There is a lot we have to leave to the police.” According to Abu Dhabi-based subcontractor Khalid Al Kuwaimi, the conditions in workplaces has improved “really incredibly” in the past five years but that improvement has not been matched on

the road.

“When I started in bconstruction, workers were killed much more often from falls off scaffolding and careless accidents but there was a big movement by the government to stop it,” he said. “But there are too, too many accidents on the road for the labourers.”

Al Kuwaimi said that his company only allows solid, safe buses to transport his workers.

“My men travel in a solid bus - it looks like a city passenger bus,” he said. “You see such buses going to the big contracts where you have serious building companies.

“It is the smaller operators, with the little minibuses or second-hand 1980s or 1990s minibuses, they are the buses that fold like a tin can. They should be banned from the road immediately,” added Al Kuwaimi.

For others, carelessly tied-down cargo on transport trucks is a major part of the problem.

Lesley Cully, founder of the road safety campaign ‘Buckle Up In The Back’, said that the “complete tragedy” in Al Ain might have been avoided if trucks did not travel with dangerous open loads.

“Also, there are no crush barriers on a lot of these trucks, so it’s easy for smaller vehicles to get crushed underneath them,” she said.

“There is a huge, huge problem with general maintenance of transport vehicles and all of this needs to change.”

She said “logic and common sense” would stop a lot of accidents.

“We need police spot checks on vehicles and better explanation to drivers about what’s safe and what’s not,” she added. “The answers aren’t all that complicated, it’s time to get back to basics.”

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