OVER the years, affluent residents of Bukit Damansara — despite being domiciled by the nation's premier political, government and corporate leaders — regularly endure sudden water cuts caused by the bursting of aging pipes.
Also to be endured and understood are scheduled cuts to instal new pipes or upgrading of water treatment plants, and the many times street contractors carelessly dig up holes, only to breach a utility pipe.
However, there's one unnerving water cut that's tough to endure and understand: blocking usable water supply owing to polluted rivers. This is unacceptable.
Yet, it occurs when there should be zero probability of it ever happening. Last July, one such dreaded incident was pinpointed to a leak from a Sungai Kuang plastic waste recycling factory processing acrylic material tanks.
As treatment plants automatically detect river toxicity, several facilities were immediately shut down, disrupting major supply in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor.
This contamination seemed apocalyptic. On March 7, 2019, illegal chemical waste dumping detected at Sungai Kim Kim in Pasir Gudang, Johor, released toxic fumes that hit 6,000 people and hospitalised 2,775.
Why are factories utilising toxic chemicals and substances that pollute rivers to begin with? Isn't there supposed to be preventive inspection by the authorities?
It turns out that the factories, particularly illegal operators, pollute our rivers by resorting to this terrible cost-saving manoeuvre: directly discharging untreated effluents, the toxic environmental impact and human abuse be damned.
Here's one that owes much to gross negligence: fuel spills and leaks during transportation by river or road, that inevitably pollutes the water source.
Other exasperating offences include sewage discharges, livestock waste dumping and sediment runoffs.
The punishment for polluting rivers is punitive enough: factories risk closure, slapped with a maximum fine of up to RM10 million and a mandatory jail term for the operators and culprits for violation of the Environmental Quality Act.
Yet, river pollution crimes are notoriously rampant because the attitude is that compliance of regulations is "optional".
Perhaps this sick mindset is motivated by obscene profits that easily buffers the massive fines substituting for actual jail time.
While rogue factories play a cat-and-mouse game with the Department of Environment, conscientious operators and households are committed to anti-pollution initiatives and water conservation measures.
This flouting of the law should never be compromised: the department religiously enforces the strict regulations and monitors known reprobate factories and operators. It can't be stressed enough: the purity of our rivers is a matter of life and death.
Rivers are a key source of livelihoods that also keep us hydrated and hygienic, irrigate our valuable crops, sustain our dense forests and precipitate our abundant rainfall. Rivers, the clean and beautiful ones at least, are absolutions for our wretchedness.
An excursion on a river waterway is therapeutic, vividly reflected by the 19th century American naturalist, essayist, poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who mused: "Who hears the rippling of rivers will not utterly despair of anything."