Cameron disaster: Duo broke window to rescue kin

Amid rising flood waters in the Bertam Valley, a 19-year old motorcycle mechanic said he and his father had to break a window and pry open a metal wire grille to save the rest of the family.

Mohd Shaifi Jamil said 20 minutes before the first warning sirens were sounded at midnight, his friend, whose father works in Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB), has already called to alert him of an impending flood.

The sirens serve as a warning that the Sultan Abu Bakar Dam upriver was about to open its floodgates.

It was in the midst of preparing for the expected floods at about 12.20am that Mohd Shaifi discovered his mother and twin sister were trapped by the sudden torrent of water.

"The water wasn't here yet and I was pushing my motorcycle (to higher ground), and then it came suddenly. I panicked because my mom was inside (the house).

"I tried the door, but I could not open it (because of the water pressure). I opened the window and saw that my mother was fine except that the water had risen to her chest.

"Me and my father tried breaking through the window and eventually we succeeded, and we took my mother and sister out and headed for safety," he said, pointing to the window.

His father lives separately opposite his home.

Their houses would later become almost completely submerged in water, Mohd Shaifi's was covered in silt up to just below the window when Malaysiakini visited on Thursday and spoke to him.

Mohd Shaifi's home is built on the riverbank and is no stranger to floods, but even this and an early warning did not prepare him for the sudden deluge that came in the wee hours of Oct 23.

He said he did not expect the water to rise so quickly nor as high as it did despite being hit by floods without fail each year. Normally the water would rise no higher than thigh-level at worst.

"In most cases, we'd be done after a day of clean-up. Now we still can't get on with life two days on," he said.

No trace left of retaining wall

Adjacent to his home was a retaining wall almost two metres tall meant to contain Sungai Bertam's banks, but there is no longer any trace of it.

A scant 20 metres from the house, a pick-up truck was washed from the street and left lying against the walls of the local surau. It is buried in silt and debris until it is barely visible.

Another stone throw away downstream, trader Abdul Aziz Mohd Awang (right) was seen salvaging his belongings from what was left of his home while his brother-in-law Ady Mohd Annuar stepped out to speak to Malaysiakini.

He, too, had received a call at around midnight, warning that "the dam gates are about to open".

However, he said neither the locals nor TNB had experienced the gates being opened as wide as it did and thus they did not take the warning seriously, especially since there was no door-to-door calls for evacuation.

"This is human error, not destiny, because it is humans who control the water. Another mistake is that they did not inform us house-to-house, just warnings with the siren," he said.