Tomorrow the Batang Kali tragedy will be a week old. Six days of unrelenting search and rescue (SAR) would test any team, but not this one.
Their steely spirit to save their fellow men and women showed no limit. And so, too, their dedicated determination to seek and find. Machines do not need sleep, but humans do. Yet, these men and women settled for just winks. Malaysia must applaud them.
And Malaysia — and by this we mean the federal and state authorities — must do one more thing. It must equip them for the punishing task. Better still, do not allow such tragedies to happen. We have said this before and we will say it again.
If we cared to learn from the tragedies of the past — there have been many — it may not be as tragic as this. Granted, some tragedies happen, but most are caused by human folly. Get rid of human folly and it will be all the easier to deal with tragedies that happen. Prevention makes mitigation unnecessary.
So how do we equip them when tragedies do happen despite all our best efforts? Give them men, machines and money. Start with men. The SAR team could have certainly used more help. A SAR mission rarely ends in a day, especially one as tragic as the Batang Kali disaster.
Twenty-six people died in the landslide with seven still missing. If a comparison is needed, the Highland Towers tragedy of 1993 serves as one. There, the tragedy struck at 1.30pm on Dec 11 and it took the SAR teams, including one from France, 11 days to find the last victim. A larger SAR team in Batang Kali would have helped the members work in shifts, between rest and rescue. A well-rested team is a more alert team.
Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim directed an all-agency team to head there on the day the tragedy struck. We think this to be a given. It should be an item in all the possible scenarios of disasters, especially on the scale of the Highland Towers and Batang Kali tragedy.
Now for the machines. Disasters determine the nature of machines to be employed. Again, the assessment is best done during the calm of disaster scenario-building rather than during the calamity of the war room.
The National Disaster Management Agency sure has some work to do here now that it knows not only floods strike during monsoons but also landslides. As for the floods, they have been the worst in 35 years, at least in Terengganu and Kelantan, if not elsewhere. It has had its tragic side, too. In one incident, three sisters lost their lives to electrocution.
Finally, the money. This is not something Malaysia has a lot of.
Not because it can't turn its abundant natural resources into money. It does. But it loses much of it to leakage when it gets to the national coffers. Be that as it may, the government has, under the unapproved 2023 Budget, allocated RM15 billion for flood mitigation measures. This is good and bad news. The good news is, this is big money. The bad news is, much of the money is for projects. And that, too, for flood mitigation. More men, machines and money need to head disaster management's way.