THE 2014 catastrophic flood was the worst in decades, displacing more than 100,000 people throughout the country.
This year's deluge appears to want to beat it. In Kelantan, it is said to have done so. Rivers are swollen, drains are clogged and rain is continuing to fall. The Meteorological Department is predicting more downpours in the east coast.
There used to be a time when we could say floods were seasonal: they were just monsoon season inundations. With climate change, floods are no longer a seasonal phenomena nor are they confined to the east coast.
Not long ago in December 2021, it was a Saturday deluge in the Klang Valley, not in the east coast. The floodwaters were house-high and the New Sunday Times had a two-word headline: "Flood Chaos". In a kampung in Hulu Langat, brick steps were all that remained. The stairway to nowhere was a metaphor for not taking flood mitigation seriously.
Managing floods may give the impression that it is the job of the National Disaster Management Agency (Nadma) and its entities in the states.
Managing floods, like managing climate change, is a before and after story. Both are important, but the more the government invests in preventing floods, the less money is needed to fund disaster management.
There are common and uncommon ways of flood prevention. The Integrated River Basin Development Project in Sungai Golok, which is said to cost RM1.5 billion, is a common way of keeping floodwaters out by building walls. Walls can last only so long.
Besides, before the project is up, the people have to put up with standing water for a long time, as some of the 40,000 villagers along Sungai Golok are experiencing.
Another less prosaic way to prevent floods is to construct water retention ponds near major rivers. Malaysia just doesn't have enough of them. What is worse, greedy developers are easing nearer the river banks as the years go by.
Consider Kuala Lumpur, a forest of concrete. The city, according to the 2019 Auditor-General's Report (Series 2), was planning to construct 15 flood retention ponds, but six of these had their land use changed to mixed development and residential status.
Mysterious as this may be, no one has explained why close to 55 per cent of the total flood retention pond acreage changed hands. And that is only how one city in the country is impeding flood mitigation plans.
A case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing? The plot thickens.
There are novel ways of erecting flood defences for sure. One such is to make the hard surfaces in the cities more permeable. Engineers call these sponge cities for good reason.
They reduce the runaway run-off even after heavy downpours. For some unexplained reasons, we have been treating rainwater as a waste to be flushed into drains and sewage systems. Those who walked the Earth before us knew the value of rainwater.
We must relearn this and bring nature into the cities. Managing surface water will be a large part of the relearning. The natural hydrological processes are telling us something, and our policymakers, city planners, architects, engineers and developers will do well to take a leaf from them. No one wants stairways to nowhere.