Malaysia drowning in decades of flood mitigation failures

 

In Kuala Krai, Kelantan, 20-year-old Mohammad Hakimin Rahim, a courageous youth who was helping ferry villagers, died after falling off his boat due to fatigue.

In Jerantut, Pahang, Ukai Iskandar Zulkarnain, a 23-year-old Universiti Malaysia Pahang (UMP) student, and his father Zulkarnain Hitam, 58, drowned.

In Kluang, Johor, Md Rajihan Junaidi, whose Proton Waja was swept up in the flood current, managed to break the window and let his wife out to safety. However, he was not as fortunate and was swept away in his car.

In Kampung Contoh, Kluang, 59-year-old Halijah Majid perished when she fell into a flooded drain.

These are but a few of at least 11 innocent lives that were prematurely extinguished across Johor, Pahang, Kelantan, Terengganu and Perak by one of the worst floods to sweep across Malaysia in recent years.

But as heart wrenching as this is, it shouldn’t come as a shock. We’re so prone to floods – both large and small – that it’s become almost as Malaysian as nasi lemak and the annual haze. Many of us are desensitised to it and regard it as an unfortunate but unavoidable nuisance that we just have to put up with.

But this isn’t a matter that should be taken lightly as every time a major flood like this happens, it claims dozens of lives, damages hundreds of millions of ringgit worth of property and incurs an additional hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money in aid, recovery and rebuilding costs.

For example, the 1996 floods killed 241 people in Sabah and caused RM300 million in losses, and the 2007 floods killed 18 people in Johor and caused RM2.4 billion in losses.

According to Wei Koon Lee and Irma Noorazurah Mohamad of Universiti Teknologi MARA, if averaged, out, floods cause a massive RM242 million a year in economic losses to the country.

And here’s what Malaysian Economic Association president Dr Norma Mansor had to say last year: “Under the various five-year Malaysia Plans, the government had spent billions of ringgit on flood control and mitigation measures with substantial increment over the years. Records showed that money spent on these projects increased from RM14 million under the Second Malaysia Plan (1971-1975) and ballooned to an estimated RM17 billion between 2006 and 2020”.

She continued: “Money spent on structural flood mitigation projects alone increased four-fold from RM1.79 billion in the period 2001-2005 to RM5.81 billion in 2006-2010”.

She added: “…the government’s investment in flood mitigation projects is more than RM4 billion beginning with 16 projects at the start of 2018. An allocation of RM443.9 million and RM150 million was announced in the 2020 Budget towards flood mitigation projects and the maintenance of existing flood retention ponds, respectively”.

In fact, after the devastating floods of 2014 -2015 which ravaged 190,000 hectares of oil palm plantations, forced the evacuation of 200,000 people and the death of at least 20, the government initiated the Permanent Flood Control Commission. Its stated goal was to prevent and mitigate floods.

And yet here we are today, with floods ravaging the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands. How is it that after decades of spending billions of ringgit on flood prevention initiatives, we’re still having to suffer through one devastating flood after another? The predicament we’re in is indicative of the abysmal failure of decades of flood mitigation efforts.

But this is certainly not the case in some other countries.

In Tokyo, Japan, the RM8 billion ringgit Kasukabe Underground Flood Protection Tank has managed to reduce the number of homes affected by water damage in the area by 90%. In a similar vein, the Netherlands, thanks to its array of flood defence mechanisms, hasn’t had a single flood-related death in more than 60 years – in spite of their landmass being largely below sea level.

These achievements show that just because floods are categorised as a natural disaster doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything about it. They prove that we don’t have to accept floods as a way of life and can institute systems that make it a concern of the past.

Due partly to humanity’s indiscriminate deforestation, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and rapidly expanding concrete jungles, extreme weather events have been increasing in frequency and magnitude in recent years. According to the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, global floods and extreme rainfall events are now happening four times more frequently than they did in 1980 – a trend we can expect to exacerbate the problem over the coming decades.

This is because a warming planet means more energy circulates in the biosphere and that in turn means more rainfall, which can cause more floods. It also means increased melting of the polar ice caps, which in turn causes sea levels to rise, also potentially causing more floods.

To counter the likelihood of increasing floods, we need to move away from this reactionary mentality of doling out aid whenever disaster strikes to being a lot more proactive by building and enhancing effective flood defence mechanisms.

This is what I’ll be discussing in my next column.

The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@gmail.com. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.