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Obituary
Food fiesta or
how to tackle a disaster |
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The Bukit
Antarabangsa landslide TODAY IS D5 of the Bukit Antarabangsa tragedy. During the highland tower incident, I was part of the medical team assisting in the rescue and support effort but today I am a victim of a similar tragedy. Something that I never thought that would have an impact on me. Relatively in comparison, what happened to those families who lost their loved ones is nothing compared to what me and probably 2000 other residents had to endure the past 4 days. Many tragedies took place this time around. I am not going to be diplomatic about it. I will say it the way I see it. Within 2 hours after being made aware of landslide, I and several residents of Taman Bukit Utama activated an Ops Centre (known as TBU Ops Centre). We looked at important issues that we needed to tackle, mainly water supply, waste disposal, security, food distribution and medical evacuation. What was supposed to be our Taman Ops centre became the Ops Centre to eight "Taman" surrounding ours who were cut off from the outside world. We had no electricity, water, fixed telephone line, internet. Most people had limited food in their house as they had already plan to travel for Raya and did not stock up any food. Within an hour after meeting, we set up and completed a temporary water supply by laying pipes to get mountain water for the residents. Ops centre was up in the next hour and we started communication channel with the outside channel via SMS and arranging food and drinking water supply. We took preventive measures to manage disease outbreak by managing waste. All this was done by a handful of people from Taman Bukit Utama Residents Association (PPTBU). We set up the helipad for |
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rescue team to come in. With the help of a friend, DSP Kumar, we managed to evacuate by air (Medivac) a total of 39 patients which consist of stroke patients, elderly people, kidney failure patients, etc. The patients were evacuated by police air wing which was arranged by DSP Kumar from the UTK through his personal contacts. We did all this independently without the support of any help from the Base station at Ground zero. Within the first 48 hours, while in darkness several homes were reported to be broken into by unknown people in residential areas adjacent to TBU where there was no or minimal residential coordination among the residents. Food was short and cooked food from PBSM (Persatuan Bulan Sabit Merah) did not arrive in a timely manner. The longest time was dinner that only reached us in the morning which was not consumable. While we are stuck, we had VVIP visitors that came to our area. I would say out of many people that came only a handful was actually helpful. YB Elizabeth Wong, a state Exco, came with a working group and arranged generators, fuel, candles, garbage bags and others. She came by foot with very few people and carried the relevant information without empty promises. The IGP came and gave me his personal commitment and blessing that I continue to handle all air evacuation with the support of Police Udara. I was told that the Minister of Information visited only the UMNO relief center at a Condo nearby. He did not come to our place. The NGO that is worth mentioning is Mercy who gave me some drugs, INSAF who open a small medical clinic for 2 days and MAVFCL (Kapt. Bala and his crew) which open a temporary access between Athenaeum condo and a generator set to charge hand phones and Bukit Utama which allowed people to leave by foot. It is a regret to note that NO government agency deserves any mention in the first 36 hours of tragedy except for Polis Udara and Jabatan Kebajikan Masyarakat. I think they forgot about us. While 2000 people were surviving in the darkness and the absence of proper food, Concord Hotel, Ali Maju restaurant, Burger King and many others donated tons of food. Unfortunately, no one attempted to send the food to us. Residents that were not affected by the tragedy and the rescue workers were enjoying them. The kind of food they get down there was lavish. There was fresh roti chanai, |
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mee
goreng etc. The best word to describe the situation down there is "food
fiesta". Someone commented that there is so much "Teh Tarik" that you
can wash your shoes with it. The landslide is a major tragedy. The bigger tragedy is that the failure of the government to act fast enough. While multiple agencies went into action fast, most of them work independently. On the 3rd day, we had 10 soldiers from RAMD with two officers with the rank of Major that came to our centre. I askef them a basic question on their role and the officers could not give me a straight answer. He was very blur. To me his presence was a liability to the ops center as we had to feed an additional 10 mouths with our limited stocks. This is not the first time a tragedy takes place. The disaster relief operation was not well coordinated. The command and control was lacking. Information dissemination to the media was scattered and caused panic among the people. Many friends and relatives outside called us and we could not entertain them, as our battery power was limited.# from Dr Mohamed Rafick Khan Abdul Rahman's Website |
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