ACTS OF GOD!
Honestly,I love the raining season.It created a lot of opportunities for me and my friends to enjoy and make a fool of ourselves! The padi fields,located less than 100 yards from my house, will be flooded. I can go fishing using 'tauk' or 'pukat' the whole day. Sometimes,we boys caught the fish with our bare hands in shallow waters. My great grandfather will come to our house by 'perahu lajur' with the tapioca and bananas. The smell of 'ubi bakar' is still exotic to me until to-day.Then,speaking for myself as a young boy then,flood was not the natural disaster and in fact I look forward to it as annual water festival.....
Gone were those days.By the way, the time I am talking about was early sixties in the district of Bachok,Kelantan. Now,we have almost no floods in the rural areas. The government had constructed drainage and irrigation canals for agriculture purposes.The irony part,now we have floods in urban areas. Not once a year like those in the kampung before, but almost every week when the heavy rains fall. Not only the youths are migrating to the cities, but the floods also are doing the same!
The recent earthquakes in Turkey,Gujerat and Indonesia really bothered me when thousands of people died.The flooded Mekong delta had also taken its tolls. To most people who read the news,it was all the acts of God. When major natural disasters like these took place, God was blamed most of the time,as if we human did not have a part in the causes leading to the casualities.
As an engineer, I think most of the blame is actually is on us-not due to lack of knowledge, but more so due to the excesses of human greed.Looking at the pictures of collapsed buildings and structures in the affected earthquake zones,both government and people in the contruction indutry are equally responsible for allowing the contruction of substandard buildings for human habitation. Some people may die due to earthquakes, but I believe the numbers will be very much reduced if we have buildings and structures constructed meeting basic standards and comply with earquake specification. Every country has their own building by-laws but the powers that be had turned a blind eye to basic safety standard when it benefit those to do so.I still remember an incident when a hotel in Bangkok collapsed when its owner just increased the hotel rooms by another three storeys. It was very unlikely the authority was not aware of the constuction that took a few months to complete.Now, I began to believe what a friend told me that in a certain country you can even get away with murder.When money talks, most people listens...
Lately,KL is having more frequent floods when it rains.It is not that KL is getting more rains but more so on how the water flows from upstream to the sea. The urbanisation has increased the percentage of paved area thus increasing the surface run-off. The natural temporary storage areas were filled up for real estate development and reduce the time of concentration-thereby increaisng the volume of discharge. To make matter worse,the jungle and contruction sites clearing/earthwork increase the sedimentaton process and reduce river capacity to discharge water. All these factors will surely increase the frequncy and severity of floods.
Looking at the flood scenario in KL,I can safely conclude that it is not the acts of God, but more due to our mismanagement of our environments and lack of enforcement of our environmental laws.
May be ,it is more appropriate to say the Punishments of God than the Acts of God.