Floods again, and again, and again!

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File photo shows flooding in Bau town.

IT’S an annual event – landas season brings a lot of rain. If heavy rain coincides with King Tides, there will be floods here and there.

Actually, it’s not randomly ‘here and there’. Floods occur mostly in the places where it flooded last year, and last decade, and last century, and as long as most of us can remember. People not personally affected talk about ‘seasonal floods’ quite calmly. They don’t have to scoop slimy muck off the kitchen floor after the event is over for the year.

Is there a way of preventing those seasonal floods? You can’t stop the rain, and you can’t stop the tide. But you can make sure the rainwater flows off as fast as possible, especially in places beyond reach of the tides that backstop the lower course of rivers. In these areas, the main culprit tends to be not the tide, but the blocked drains.

Blocked with, sorry to say, not only grass and leaves but rubbish. Builders’ rubbish. Household rubbish. I sincerely hope that after the flood we have just suffered, victims won’t chuck their now useless sodden carpets, mattresses, pillows, and whatnots into a drain or river. I understand that Trienekens is putting on extra rubbish collection runs, but the nearest watercourse has been the rubbish dump of choice for many centuries. Let’s hope that as of 2021, everybody has dropped this bad habit!

Clear drains would be one way of mitigating floods – completely preventing them is hardly possible. But there are a few methods that would be well worth trying. For instance, we can adapt ourselves to the facts of nature, like our venerable elders did. Traditional Sarawak houses were built up on stilts, and for good reason. When the monsoon floods came, the house compound might have been flooded, but the living quarters were more likely to be safe. Just bring up the goats and chickens until the water has subsided.

Another way of mitigating floods in our large rivers is to stop deforesting the upper reaches of the catchment. Easier said than done, and in most cases it’s too late now anyway. A river in spate washes tons of silt downstream – ask anyone who has had to clean up a single-storey house after a flood! As long as the river flows downward, it carries the mud. Then it reaches the tidal plain; the gradient is almost zero and the current weakens. That’s where the silt will be deposited. Look at the foreshore of Sibu town during the dry months. Those mud islands were not there 50 years ago, but they are clear evidence of the bustling town’s flood problems. The riverbed is full of silt.

A silted-up river can be dredged, that’s usually done to keep a shipping lane open. It would have to be done all the time, but it might be worth a try. Just don’t build levies to heighten the riverbanks!

Levies were thought to be the grand solution to the lower Mississippi flood problems. The river bottom silted up, the water level rose, the levies were built higher, silt deposits raised the water level again, the levies were built higher, ad infinitum. In the end, the river flowed, flowed, several yards above New Orleans. And then, wham came hurricane Katarina, in 2005! Once the levies banking the river through the town had burst, there was no stopping the water. Over 1,800 people were killed in that disaster, some 800,000 homes were destroyed. Even now, 15 years later, many survivors have not yet got back to a normal life.

Whatever scientific marvels mankind can accomplish, we cannot make water stand upright. It’ll flow to the lowest level, and if your house stands at the lowest level, your house will get flooded. You don’t need an engineering degree to understand that.

The Italians built an impressive flood barrage to protect the old city of Venice (and a couple of months ago it didn’t work …). The good folks of the Netherlands have had a few centuries of experience with water problems. They’ve quite seriously started to design houseboats for everyday living, not just for holiday jaunts. But I don’t see either of these solutions as suitable, or indeed necessary, for Sarawak. We have enough land for three million people. We’ll just have to retreat to the hills.

Seriously lah – consider re-siting some of the most endangered settlements. Not just in Sarawak. There is concern, worldwide, that many large cities standing close to the slowly rising sea will eventually become uninhabitable. A UNO scientist who visited Sarawak in the late 1990s taught me the word ‘climate refugee’, coastal populations who will need to resettle in higher-lying areas because of the rising sea levels.

In a small way, Sarawak actually leads the way in ‘climate resettling’. I know of at least a couple of small-scale examples right here, near Kuching: Tondong and Siniawan. The old bazaars flooded with monotonous regularity, every time King Tide was combined with rain. The new bazaars stand on slightly higher ground, above the floods most years.

Yeah, most years. There is no absolute protection against storms and floods, but we all have to do our bit to minimise the danger. The problem doesn’t only concern those whose house has just got flooded. It concerns us all.

Climate emergencies are nothing new, it’s just that not all people get the message. When the patriarch Noah started to build his ark, the neighbours either laughed, or scoffed. “What do you mean, a Great Flood? That’s a scam, old chap … it’s fake news …”

Noah just went on hammering. Maybe the neighbours then went off to file a noise pollution report. We have no way of knowing what those ancient climate-deniers did next. They left no record.

They all drowned.

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