Dubai authorities issued warnings to the owner and tenants of a house crammed with more than 400 foreign laborers three years before a deadly fire earlier this week killed 11 migrants, the city's chief building inspector said.
Like many countries in the Gulf region, the United Arab Emirates has relied on a steady stream of cheap South Asian labor to fuel a construction boom that has transformed Dubai from little more than a patch of sand a decade ago to a city of skyscrapers as far as the eye can see.
The shortage of affordable housing in the city has left migrant workers with few living options other than overcrowded labor camps or dangerously packed houses like the one that burned down Tuesday in one of Dubai's deadliest fires. International human rights organizations have long criticized the conditions foreign workers face in Dubai, but little has changed on the ground.
The ground floor of the two-story house that burned down Tuesday had been partitioned into at least 30 rooms, with as many as 20 workers living in some of them, Brig. Abdul-Jaleel Mahdi Mohammed, deputy director of preventive security for the Dubai police, said Thursday. The second story was an additional modification to accommodate the more than 400 workers living in the house, he said.
"We were aware that too many people had been living there," said Omar Abdul-Rahman, the head of Dubai's building inspection department.
Abdul-Rahman said the owner and tenants of the house ignored two warnings issued after inspectors discovered in 2006 that rooms were being added and a second floor was being built.
"Too many people want a cheap house," said Abdul-Rahman. "And too many people are willing to put lives in danger by having people live with hazardous materials and without safety."
Dubai authorities have detained one of the two Asian brokers who allegedly rented the house from an Emirati owner, said police official Mohammed.
Foreign workers are officially supposed to live in labor camps or industrial zones that have been specifically designated for them. The house that burned down Tuesday _ killing 10 Indians and one Bangladeshi _ was located in Dubai's commercial and residential district, not in the area specified for migrants.
"The house was not used for the purpose it was intended," said Redha Salman, director of health and safety in Dubai.
Salman said companies routinely ignore warnings from his department about housing violations within the city's labor camps, industrial zones and even on construction sites.
Most of the people living in the house that burned down Tuesday were unskilled laborers who earned up to 800 dirhams, or US$218, a month working as janitors or garbage collectors.
Sankar Raj, a 30-year-old Indian worker, escaped the fire by jumping out of the window of the room he had been sharing with 18 other laborers for a year at a cost of 300 dirhams _ US$81 _ for a bed. His 28-year-old brother, Gangaram, was trapped by the roaring flames and died after the ceiling collapsed.
