Emerging safety risks from public facilities: a field study for ablution spaces in mosques

Muslims require an exclusive ablution space for preparing for daily prayers in mosques. Ablution floors seem to entail design challenges since they are often encountered in lubricated conditions from worshippers’ body cleaning manoeuvers. Accordingly, fall risks on saturated surfaces of ablution floors would be a major issue to Muslim worshippers. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the safety status of mosque ablution floors in terms of slip resistance properties and surface texture.

Fifteen mosques in Dubai and Sharjah cities of the UAE were randomly chosen to investigate the safety conditions of ablution spaces. In-situ slip-resistance properties and surface finishes of each ablution floor were measured under clean, wet, and soapy conditions at two different volumes of traffic areas: heavy- and non-traffic. Surface finishes of ablution floors were also measured and analysed.

Outcomes from this study evidently showed that the inspected ablution floors were not currently protected against falls, especially under wet and soapy environments. Surface analyses identified that the present ablution floors have extremely flat surfaces (? 2 µm in the Ra parameter) so they require significant improvements against fall risks.

Regardless of the magnitude of this issue, it is scarce to attain any published study on ablution floors’ fall incidence and avoidance plans in the scientific and technical literature. There are also no officially and publicly available data on fall incidents from ablution places in mosques. Findings from this study would be a great step forward to establish safer ablution floors for Muslim prayers.