Tuesday, June 12, 2007

The Swimming Pool Night

It was raining quite heavily on Sunday night.

I parked my car at St. John's for a change, thinking that I can walk nearer to the LRT station down the hill. I never like to park at KLCC for the parking fee there is the most expensive ever in town.

So I spent the entire day getting the necessary torrent stuff from Starbucks' broadband network.
It was 8.30 p.m. when it's still heavy rain outside. From what I was told, the rain started at around 6 in the evening. I was back at the LRT station in Masjid Jamek, adjacent to Royal Selangor Club.


Fortunately, I did carry my umbrella along just in case. I had a hunch that it's going to rain in the evening. But I didn't know that it would rain so heavily. The picture above is the mud mess in Jalan Melaka. That night, I had to stop and shelter at two places. A restaurant along the road was the first stop. I had to have my dinner there, in case if I could not move out back to the car due to the prolonged heavy rain. There was thunder and lightning so I had to wait for the right time to go. I dashed across the road ignoring my shoes and pants in the big puddles of water and ran all the way to the church to dry myself again.


I was made to wait for another 30 minutes or so before I moved. At that time, the rain was not as heavy as before. I heard that after I left, the windows of McDonald's or Burger King was broken due to the excessive vibration from the bus driving down the flooded road.

The next day - would you look at that. The same place where I came out yesterday evening back to my car.


Immediately I thought of a accidental swimming pool made from the graces of Mother Nature.

I met my friend who was working at the Star during lunch hour. We talked about the flood thing. Told him of the 6-person injury that night. And what I got was that he told me that I was lucky not to park at Merdeka Square. At least the parking lots at St. John's is at the higher ground.

Development Authorities Rapped

Today, PM Abdullah Badawi rapped the DID - Department of Irrigation and Drainage for not implementing sufficient measures to combat such disasters as the flood. And look at how the department director Ahmad Fuad Embi fumbled in replying to the PM's criticism.

Frankly the SMART tunnel isn't totally complete yet. I talked to some people including Jeff Ooi and I concurred that the the car tunnel was completed first ahead of the flood alleviation component which is the foremost component of the project. See, this shows that some development authorities lack the foresight. If there is one reason I am asked to give of why the tunnel ahead, it's probably the urgency to recoup the money needed for the development and concessionaire of the project.

So far only half of the planned water retention ponds are completed. The rest of the ponds that were not finished was due to design conflicts, costs, unexpected delays and worst of all - procrastination.

See, procrastination is still a bad habit in Malaysia, and haven't we learn from Sunday's disaster or last year's Johor flood disaster that we should go ahead and do more things if we have extra time available from the time we saved? It is indeed worth to do more rather than nothing. I think that until this thing is solved, we should at least consider holding the toll collection thing off until July. Yesterday, there are some angry people, for the first time ever threw stuff like bottles - real anger - at the development authorities.

This is the government that we choose and we face.

1 comment:

  1. My shoes were so messed up on Monday when I decided to take a walk along Masjid Jamek, across Lebuh Ampang, to work. Terribly dirty and muddy streets. No wonder Pak Lah is so angry! :(

    ReplyDelete

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