>Notice whenever a national issue crops up, and when the PAPpy ministers get tongue-tied, it is Super(old)man to the rescue? I am referring to the latest fiasco, The Great Singapore Flood.
Yes, it’s always the same. Whenever the PAPpy lapdogs are unable to quieten the masses, Old Man comes up and puts his foot down (and many times onto the wrong place). The Flooding Episode is no different.
THE government’s best efforts are no match for Mother Nature.That was Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew’s on Wednesday, as he said that there was little that could be done to circumvent flooding after the recent bouts of ‘extraordinary rainfall’.
Asked if he thought the Government’s response to the flooding had been sufficient, MM Lee said: ‘How can you say the response is sufficient?’
‘But at the same time, whatever we do, when we get extraordinary rainfall like we had recently, no amount of engineering can prevent flooding. There’s a limited amount of space that you can dig underground, limited amount of space that you can have run-offs for canals,’ he told reporters after visiting a development project along the Kolam Ayer section of the Kallang River.
The remarks, his first since three floods hit Singapore in the past month, come just two days after a 90-minute discussion about the flood in Parliament.
In that discussion, it emerged that flood-prone areas in Singapore had been reduced from 3,178ha in the 1970s to 66ha today. Despite that, MM Lee said that Singaporeans would always expect more.
What? Singapore, a first world country, unable to tackle a third world problem? This is rubbish. Utter rubbish. For about more than 20 years, from 1980s to 2000s, we never had a flood. In fact, we never had a flood for so long, one of the PAPpy lackeys even boasted that flooding happens only “once in 50 years”. Heh, since we have had three major floods so far, we have past 150 years?
Here are some issues:
1. No one, not the ministers or govt agencies like LTA, PUB blah, blah, blah, knows what causes the floods now, when it had never happened the last more than 20 years. That shows their incompetence.
2. It is not the floods cannot be tackled. It is the govt thinks it is too costly to tackle the issue. With today’s technology, many low lying cities are able to tackle flooding. So why not Singapore?
3. All the fat salaries failed to attract the best policy makers and brains to the civil sector, such that a simple issue like flooding can be addressed.
4. To upgrade our drainage and/or flood control system, we need money. I am quite sure the govt is thinking of cost and hence, brushed the flood aside as Act of God. But then, why are we spending so much on other areas, eg Defence?
Now before anyone claims I am saying defence is not important, let me assure I am not saying that. I am saying that our expenditure on defence is very high and a lot of it is wasteful. Just like America and Israel (the two most war-itchy nations) who spend billions on senseless wars, we are doing the same for our defence.
I believe it is all lack of planning and unwillingness to put up a budget for the Flood Control Programme. There is nothing that cannot be done to control floods, bearing in mind today’s technology.
This is the 21st century. We are no longer living in the 1970s. Flooding should not even be a problem for us to begin with.
