Opinion: Was there a failure in alerting about floods?

Farmers wait for the water to recede in a paddy field in Tanjong Maya,
though many areas affected by floods have seen improvement in Tutong

Dear Editor,

IN 2008, the floods that hit Tutong were pretty rough. That year some of our relatives who live in the flood affected areas had no chance at all to save their belongings on the first floor. The water, as you can imagine, swept away everything from furniture to appliances, ruined the cars, motorcycles, bicycles that were in and around the kampongs affected.

It was the worse since the 60s my uncle had told me. He himself had a hazy recollection about that whole ordeal, and he moved out of my grandparents’ home to his relatives who lived in the Brunei-Muara district.

There were no warnings that such an incident would take place again and instead the authorities said that mitigation works to prevent such a disaster from ever happening again would be carried out. Then in 2014, the floods (yes, that’s right there have been floods in one part of Tutong or another since 2008) came around again, but this time they struck in a far more devastating manner.

My relatives, who still live in the area and were in one of the badly affected areas, had tried every measure they could think of to save their home from being hit by the rising waters. They moved the majority of their furniture onto tables but all in vain. This time around the ceiling of the ground floor of their two storey home has now become the floor of a bungalow. Everything has once again been taken away from them.

So what ever happened to those mitigation works that the authorities said that would prevent the floods from rising? If they couldn’t guarantee the safety of homes and citizens of the flood hit areas, why didn’t they ask the residents to move out? If they didn’t want to move out, I’m sure that there would have been some kind of work that could have spared the flood-hit people from hardships and suffering.

If no amount of physical work could have been done to alleviate the situation, maybe we could have adopted some early warning systems that could have sounded the alarm to the public.

First I ask myself, “Why were these people not warned that they live on a flood plain anyways?”

Since that can’t be helped, I sometimes wonder about the the National Disaster Management Centre (NDMC). When I first got in touch with the NDMC to find out whether my relatives back in the kampong were affected, the reply I got was, “You’ll have to get in touch with the District Office or the Ketua Kampong…”

I’ll let the public be the judge on whether that is helpful or not, but I honestly feel that the NDMC, even before these situations arise, can play an even bigger role in protecting the public from natural disasters. The solutions don’t need to be expensive solutions, and they don’t need to be high-tech either.

I’m sure the NDMC can work closely with the Meteorological Department and have a skeleton crew that’s kept abreast of certain scenarios that may or may not play out, and warn residents who are most at risk in these situations. Since this is a seasonal thing, and when the monsoon hits, why not have this skeleton crew operate then?

How much does a telephone call cost? How much does it take to send out an automated message to ‘Ketua Kampongs’ to inform them that their community might be hit by a storm and combined with the hightide/water levels it could amount to a flood. These are all resources that are already in place, why not tweak it so they’re better utilised and aligned? Why is the public not informed of the findings of what went wrong in the wake of these disasters? These are pertinent issues, and they might help the public living in flood-prone areas decide what action they should take with their homes and lives.

Omar Coming, Sengkurong


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