KOTA KINABALU: Sabah has requested the National Disaster Management Agency (Nadma) to carry out cloud seeding amid the drying up of river catchment areas coupled with the growing number of wildfires across the state.
Sabah State Secretary Datuk Seri Safar Untong (pic) said the state government has officially written to Nadma over the matter.
“We hope it will be done by this week,” he said here yesterday.
He said the state was hoping for the cloud seeding to be done over all water catchment areas as well as at Tawau’s Pulau Sebatik, where the water dam had dried out following the setting in of the dry spell about six weeks ago.
Hundreds of villagers have been appealing for assistance after their gravity water feeds in the Tuaran area on the foothills of Mount Kinabalu dried up early this month.
Firemen have also been battling bush, forest and peat fires over the last month.
They have now resorted to using helicopters to carry out water bombings to put out fires in hilly terrain that cannot be reached by firemen from the ground.
Weathermen had forecast last year that Sabah, unlike the rest of the country, was going to see less rainfall due to the El Nino phenomenon with the onset of the usually wet northeast monsoon season that started in November last year and ends around this month.
Deputy Chief Minister III Datuk Shahelmey Yahya recently said that weathermen are anticipating Sabah’s dry spell to continue until May.
However, he said that water dams, with the exception of Tawau’s Pulau Sebatik dam, could cope with water needs for another three months.
