Inland tsunami

I must say that we are quite lucky in Malaysia as there are fewer natural disasters as compared to other countries like Australia, China, India, Pakistan and many others or even our immediate neighbor, Indonesia where occurrences of natural disaster such as earthquake, typhoon, tsunami and so on not only causing severe damage, affecting livelihood of millions of its people but also causing thousands succumbed to death.

After seeing how the floodwaters swept through Brisbane, the third largest city in Australia, I couldn’t imagine if similar thing happens in Kuala Lumpur and couldn’t stop wondering is our government ready to face such catastrophic disaster? Coming from a northern state Perlis where floods are common occurrence during monsoon season, I still couldn’t believe my eyes after seeing how severe was the floods in Australia and no wonder some people described it as inland tsunami, the water rise at a lightning speed and everybody caught off guard, houses and properties were swamped, cars were swept away by strong current.

As one of the victims put it; “while we can rebuild, you can’t replace people”. Once again, Mother Nature unleashed something so powerful that lending people powerless to do a thing. The experts were saying that the catastrophic flood was due to the occurrence of La Nina but again what causes La Nina?

It is perhaps a timely reminder to all of us, do more to conserve the environment or our future generations may suffer more such disasters in their time.