• Home

Global Village back in business

The relatively windy weather yesterday attracted large crowds to the Global Village, a popular venue for a day out for families in the UAE. The authorities were forced to shut down and evacuate the venue by 11pm on Thursday night on a weather warning.

“This Friday has been so far the best,” said Doris Bollinger, Business Manager of the Swiss Candy House outlet at the Village. “The entire day has been very busy,” she said, adding that the large turnout of people throughout the day was good.

Raman who runs a food outlet at the GV Food Court also reported good business. “We will make up for the losses incurred yesterday.” He said the good weather has forced many to enjoy a day out at the Global Village and large crowds flooded the food outlets.

Hussain Kaswani, Project Manager at Global Village, said: “We do not see any panic among people because of last night’s weather warning,” he said.

He pointed out that following warnings received from several sources that a tornado was expected to hit Dubai, the Village management confirmed the warning, and decided to close the venue early.

“GV is located in an open area and we did not want to take any chances due to the expected bad weather. So we made the announcements urging people to evacuate the venue and by 11pm the GV doors were closed.”

He admitted that the sudden closure may have affected business on the weekend which reported the highest turnout of people so far since the Village opened this year, “but in the interest of public safety, we took the decision to close early”.

He said that the tornado warning was not a hoax. Infact the Dubai Municiplaity employees and essential services staff were instructed to be on high alert, if the emirate was to be hit by bad weather.

• UAE