Workplace environmental demands and energizers at two Kuwait oil companies

The Work Compatibility Improvement Framework was developed and used to assess the environmental and ergonomic work conditions at two oil companies in Kuwait: One is a government-owned company, while the other is a private subcontractor of the government-owned company. The work compatibility presents demand–energizer environmental factors that act upon the individuals in the workplace. The reliability coefficients were tested and considered good (0.752) and excellent (0.855) for two domain conditions environment and ergonomics, respectively. Results reveal that in all of the three regions of the government-owned company (north, southwest, east) the ‘overall’ compatibility data for the ‘environment’ is perceived to be poor. The ‘ergonomics’ compatibility data seem to be average in the southeast and west, while it is considered to be poor in the north. As for the private subcontractor, the perceived ‘environment’ is considered to be poor for two departments out of four (slickline and wellhead maintenance), while considered moderate for the remaining two (maintenance and crude/chemical handling). The ‘ergonomics’ compatibility is reported to be poor for crude/chemical handling and wellhead maintenance jobs; while the conditions seem to be moderate for the maintenance and slickline jobs. The major conclusion extracted from this study is that the oil sector organizations in Kuwait are not managed as ergo-environmental enterprises where there is disharmony in the ergonomics system, environmental system, and the ergo-environmental interface interaction. These gaps in the enterprise-wide systems have a significant impact on work productivity and the environment conditions.     

Temperature inversion and mixing height: critical indicators for air pollution in hot arid climate

Natural Hazards - Boundary layer temperature inversion and mixing heights are important parameters in understanding the atmospheric dispersion of air pollution. Surface and elevated inversions were...     

Socioeconomic effect of dust storms in Kuwait

Kuwait is an arid country with an annual average rainfall of about 110 to 120 mm. Hence, dust storms have become a common environmental crisis. Although the dry summer months commonly have more dust storms, in recent years, dust storms occur more frequently in the spring season as well. Accumulated data of dust storms in Kuwait for the past 14 years (2001–2014) showed that the month of March had the highest number of dust storms (total 19), which is rather unusual, with an average of 8 dust storms per year (year 2008 had the highest dust storms of total 22). This study explored four socioeconomic effects of dust storms in Kuwait, specifically traffic accident rates, oil export loss due to close out of marine terminals, airline delays due to airport operation shutdown, and agriculture degradation. Statistical analysis using t test and Pearson correlation showed no apparent relationship between dust storms and traffic accident rates or agricultural production; however, loss of oil export and flight delay cost were affected by dust storms. There has been very few published research on the socioeconomic impact of dust storms; this is the first paper that explores the detailed socioeconomic effect of dust storms in Kuwait.