Patience runs dry with dry taps



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It is absolute rubbish. The people of the Klang Valley do not deserve to face this constant water disruption, over and over again.

Kuala Lumpur and Selangor are the most populated areas in the country.

Every time there is a water outage, there is a serious business multiplier effect and it is not just a simple inconvenience.

It is bad enough that the Covid-19 pandemic has affected small businesses, especially restaurants, hairdressers, laundries, bakeries and ordinary homes; we have all been affected.

It does not matter if the supply to your home is not cut off because indirectly it would still be affected.

The Klang Valley is starting to feel like a half-cooked banana republic without an adequate water supply and we certainly have a right to be angry that this has happened too many times.

The latest is another suspected contamination at Sungai Selangor that has forced Pengurusan Air Selangor Sdn Bhd (Air Selangor) to issue a work stoppage order at its Phase 1,2, 3 and Rantau Panjang water treatment plants, thereby which has caused unscheduled water outages to nearly 1.2 million accounts in the state.

The contamination was detected around 2 a.m. on Monday (October 19).

“Repair work on the burst pipe at Sg Selangor’s Phase 1 water treatment plant is 80% complete, but the work cannot continue due to odor contamination at the same plant,” Air said. Selangor in a statement.

Just over the weekend, Selangor homes had also suffered another water outage caused by a pipe that broke on Saturday (October 17).

The new unscheduled water cut in Selangor comes just as homes are recovering from an earlier outage in September, also caused by pollution from the river in Sungai Gong, which feeds Sungai Selangor.

The deeper question we must ask ourselves is why this problem persists and when will we stop hearing the abused cliche from authorities assuring us that they will get to the bottom of it. As it is now, it looks like a bottomless hole.

Factories are still located near waterways and the public still treats our rivers, the lifeline of our water supply, like a garbage dump. In an interview with environmental activist Maya Karin last week, the actress told me that she once found a sofa floating in a river.

Our schools must instill the importance of treating the environment with respect.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) is reported to have launched investigations into the contamination of the Sungai Gong that led more than 1.2 million users in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor to face water outages in September. .

In a statement on Sept. 15, MACC said the investigation aims to analyze whether there were elements of corruption in the incident, including among law enforcement officials.

In September, after the public outcry, we were told that one of the factories behind the cause of the pollution in Rawang had been closed by the authorities for two weeks.

The factory is alleged to have released solvent at Sungai Gong, which flows into Sungai Sembah, one of the main rivers in Sungai Selangor, but what has angered many of us is that the Selayang Municipal Council (MPS) said that the factory is responsible for pollution. had been operating illegally since 2014.

How can this factory be operating illegally for six years without the enforcement agency acting on it, unless the officers are on the take or are complacent? Worse still, the factory, which repairs heavy machinery, was reported to be among 308 other factories operating illegally under MPS jurisdiction.

Selangor’s executive councilor in charge of local government, public transport and new village development, Ng Sze Han, has said that unlicensed factories that pose a high risk of causing pollution, due to the nature of their business, should move.

Please. Tell us something we don’t know. He reportedly said that “we have to review licensed operations that process raw wastewater near rivers or bodies of water.” Why is it necessary to recheck? They shouldn’t even be there in the first place.

It revealed that more than 700 unlicensed factories in the Klang district were at risk of being closed by the authorities if the owners did not legalize them by December 31. Klang has 1,127 unlicensed factories and only 395 are legal.

A total of 732 have not submitted documents to the district land office for the conversion of agricultural to industrial land. Others have not even submitted construction plans to legalize the building’s structure, he said.

We’re sick and tired of these afterthoughts, excuses, and promises of action, which, well, don’t hold water and lead nowhere – until the next water outage.

We are tired.



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