‘We fled with only the clothes on our backs’

The ground this family from Kampung La, Jerteh, is sitting on used to be their house. All that’s left now, after days of rain and flooding in the hard-hit village, are a few bricks, gravel and the clothes on their backs.

JERTEH: Sorrowful and heart-rending is the feeling when one witnesses the latest situation in Kampung La here after it was inundated by floodwaters a week ago.

For one family of six, the disaster not only swept away their clothes but their entire house which they had been occupying since a year ago.

The family had watched helplessly as their household items such as the refrigerator and washing machine were swept away during the floods. The wooden structure is currently nowhere to be found.

On the second day of the floods, Suriati Mohd Yusof, 35, saw the zinc roof and floor boards of her house stuck on the fence of SK Kampung La, about 200m from the original site of her house.

Their attempts to salvage the pieces of their house came to nought when subsequent heavy rain caused water to rise further, sweeping away even the bits of what used to be their home.

“On the first day of the incident, the flood occurred at 10am and water entered the house exceedingly fast. We fled for our lives with only the clothes on our backs to the nearby school.

“The water was too fast, darkness fell quickly and the rain poured ... we waded through chest-deep water to reach the school, forgetting about our house which by then had been swept away.

“Saving our lives was all that mattered at that time,” said Suriati, who is only left with a piece of sarong given to her by a fellow villager.

The aftermath: A motorcyclist waiting near a road destroyed by the floods at Kampung La in Jerteh. —Bernama

During the incident, Suriati’s husband Hardi Mazda, 55, a lorry driver, was in Kuala Lumpur.

She was staying in the house with their three children Adam Danish, 14, Nur Syalina Hartini, 12, and Aliya Danisha, seven, as well as her sister Nur Azila, 19, and her friend Siti Nur Fazlida Mohd Asri, 22.

Located 30km from Jerteh town in Terengganu, Kampung La was the area worst-hit by the floods this time as the village was cut off from the outside world for almost three days when the sole access road was under 3m of water.

In fact, a Besut district office lorry was stuck and abandoned when trying to deliver supply to the residents.

Several mercy flights were performed by the Gong Kedak-based Royal Malaysian Air Force to airlift pregnant women and handicapped children for treatment at the Besut Hospital in Jerteh.

A Bernama survey at the village late Tuesday evening found numerous marks of destruction such as swept-away stalls, unhinged doors, structural damage to houses and severely damaged tarred roads.

Currently, Suriati, who only has RM15 in cash, is forced to put up at another villager’s house while waiting for her husband to arrive home to build a new house on an inherited plot of family land a bit further away from the original site of their house.

Meanwhile, Kampung La Village Community Management Council chairman Abdul Razak Laboh said the government must provide new locations for the residents as it was the only choice available to them.

“Until when should we live like this? Every year, we are forced to face the same problem. This is not a problem which has occurred once or twice but has dragged on since 60 years ago,” said Abdul Razak.

“We were offered a new location but it was on the fringe of the jungle. We want the government to provide a new site with existing public amenities but our appeals were ignored all this while.” — Bernama