PETALING JAYA: Malaysia should better prepare itself to deal with floods like the ones which swept through most of Peninsular Malaysia over the weekend, warned a green group.
While the environment and water ministry’s secretary-general, Zaini Ujang, described the floods as a once-in-a-century weather event yesterday, Global Environmental Centre (GEC) river care programme manager Kalithasan Kailasam said such disasters would be more common than that.
“If the public thinks this is a one-off thing, I’m sorry. This will be more frequent,” he told FMT.
“We need to slowly learn to live with such floods, and all our buildings and roads must be resilient to high rainfall.”
Kalithasan also called for community-based flood preparation programmes, where the public, especially children, could learn about floods and be trained to deal with them.
As of last night, more than 41,000 flood victims in seven states had been moved to temporary relief centres, with the deluge of rainfall also causing untold damage to property and leaving numerous motorists stranded in flooded roads.
Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob highlighted how Selangor’s response was “rather chaotic” as opposed to other states like Pahang, Terengganu and Kelantan, which would have anticipated the effects of the year-end monsoon season.
While Kalithasan stated that the massive amount of rainfall – with records broken in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor – was a result of a tropical depression, he said climate change had a huge part to play in the calamity.
Apart from increased flood intensities, a Universiti Putra Malaysia study in 2018 noted that other impacts of climate change in the Malaysian context included rising sea levels, tidal inundation of coastal areas and shoreline erosion.
However, beyond climate change, Kalithasan said, there were two other factors in the massive flooding Malaysians had just seen – the reduced capacity of drains and the lack of holding ponds seen in stormwater drainage tunnels such as SMART.
Describing drains as the “frontliners for collecting rainwater”, he said it was unfortunate that many of the country’s drains were “all clogged up with rubbish and a lot of other nonsense”.
“I’m not saying all drains, but most are full of rubbish and other things which reduce their carrying capacity, which then affects rivers, some of which cannot carry the heavy rainfall load,” he said.
He said Malaysia needed more holding ponds to hold water at strategic locations before they were released to monsoon drains or rivers, and that SMART, while “very good”, was not designed to serve as the Klang Valley’s water catchment.
The SMART tunnel diverted five million cubic metres of water since it was activated on Saturday for about 22 hours because of the amount of rain, with Zaini stating that this had spared several areas in Kuala Lumpur from major floods.
SMART – an acronym for Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel – was designed to divert large volumes of flood water from entering the heart of Kuala Lumpur through a holding pond, bypass tunnel and storage reservoir. - FMT
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