Sadness amid year end festivities

Pups on duty: Search and Rescue (SAR) personnel together with K-9 search dogs during operations at Father’s Organic Farm in Batang Kali after the landslide. — FAIHAN GHANI/The Star

Tragedy seems to be the norm especially in December, from floods to landslides and higher number of deaths from road accidents that we can only hope and pray for a better 2023.

JUBILATION and tragedy seem to go hand in hand when it comes to the month of December.

Just as we wind down and look forward to the year-end holidays as well as Christmas and welcoming the New Year, this festive period is always tinged with sadness.

The last month of the year typically brings heavy rainfall due to the northeast monsoon season, but it has also brought with it many tragedies, some of which had nothing to do with the rains.

From the Highland Towers tragedy in 1993 where 48 people lost their lives, to the 2004 tsunami (68 deaths) to the ‘once-in-a-century’ floods last year (54 dead) and now to the present where the country is still mourning for the senseless loss of 30 lives (only one is still missing) in the Batang Kali landslide.

All these tragedies have one thing in common, they all occurred during the school holidays in December.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of victims affected by the Batang Kali landslide. What should have been an enjoyable camping trip involving teachers, parents, and pupils of SJK(C) Mun Choong turned out to be an unspeakable and horrific disaster.

Unfortunately, and regardless of which government sits in Putrajaya, tragedies like this are not new to us.

Malaysians of a certain age will of course remember the collapse of Highland Tower. To this day, many decades later, no one has been held responsible or charged for the tragedy.

I recall as a young reporter in the days after the incident, when bodies were still being recovered at the site, there were whisperings that a powerful personality was behind the development that may have contributed to this horrible tragedy.

Whatever the case may be, whether it be a developer or engineer or civil servants who approved the ultimately flawed development, no one has been brought to book several decades on.

We have a new government now. Will they take the same cue, or will they get to the bottom of this latest landslide incident and ensure that an investigation into the cause of the disaster is carried out without political interference?

After all, it’s no secret that there is over development going on in the Batang Kali and Genting area.

For starters, I applaud the decision of the government not to have an official countdown to the New Year at Dataran Merdeka on Dec 31.

“Due to the floods and issues faced by the people, we decided that big celebrations like the New Year’s Eve countdown are cancelled,” the Prime Minister announced on Wednesday.

Floods have badly devastated the East Coast states and having a countdown celebration will be in bad taste knowing that we have thousands of displaced Malaysians who are suffering from the effects of floods.

In some ways we are blessed because we don’t have earthquakes and volcano eruptions like our neighbour Indonesia, but floods are a perennial problem in this country. And the worst time for this phenomenon is December.

It’s been raining almost every evening and, you guessed it – this brings traffic jams and flash floods. I should also probably add landslides and cave-ins for good measure.

Given Malaysia’s geographic location, most floods here are a natural result of cyclical monsoons during the local tropical wet season that are characterised by heavy and regular rainfall from roughly October to March.

This occasional heavy rainfall is something we are going to experience in the coming weeks.

Mother nature and climate change is something that would be hard to overcome, but unfortunately for us, inadequate drainage in many urban areas will also enhance the effects of heavy rain.

Will this year’s monsoon cause as much damage as last year’s disastrous flooding? Meteorologists think its unlikely but not impossible.

They point out that the unusually heavy rainfall at the end of 2021 was a key reason for the “once-in-a-century’ floods.

And there is another alarming statistic for the last month of the year. This is the month when we see the largest number of deaths on the road.

The numbers for the first nine months of 2022 year represents a 58% increase (or 147,094) in accident cases over that period in 2021, while the death toll increased by nearly 32% (or 1,055 fatalities).

And statistically, December is the worst month for road fatalities as more people travel for holidays across the country.

PLUS Malaysia Bhd says that for the upcoming year-end festive celebration of Christmas and New Year, daily traffic volume is expected to rise to two million vehicles daily, starting from today until Jan 2nd.

The festive period is a cause for celebrations, but statistics show that about 80% of road crashes are caused by human errors because most of the crashes are avoidable and preventable.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – Charles Dickens penned this famous line in a Tale of Two Cities – but he could so easily have been describing December. As we close the year reeling from the East Coast floods and the Batang Kali tragedy, let us hope and pray for a better 2023.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our readers.