…as we enter day 4 without water. Well, we did get a bit last night. In fact, quite a lot. Trouble was it was so brown it was opaque. Just the sort of thing you’d like to bathe in and wash your clothes with. Quite frankly, I wasn’t sorry when it suddenly stopped running again.
But here’s the interesting thing. The reason WHY we have no water.
Us and 425,ooo other households and hell knows how many people, certainly over a million of us. Oh, and that includes KLIA airport.
- Three pipes were broken by sand-miners.
- These sand-miners had been mining for five years, according to a nearby villager.
- The sand mining is (as far as I know) illegal.
- Yep, that’s right – in Malaysia you can, quite openly, do something illegal for 5 years, make a fortune tax free selling something that didn’t belong to you in the first place, and the only reason you get stopped is because you were silly enough and brazen enough to break some major water mains.
Bravo all the people who ignored the mining going on under their noses. (One wonders – was anyone paid to turn a blind eye, or are they just stupid and indifferent?) You don’t do sand mining with buckets and spades and sneaking around in the dark. It involves pumps and heavy machinery and trucks. Lots of trucks. Lots of noise.
A police report has been made. Will anyone be brought to court on charges? Well now, what do you think?
My guess is that no one even noticed – in 5 long years – who was responsible. If they did, then I bet they get a slap on the wrist and a fine that isn’t even 1% of the clear profit they have made – after the taxes they didn’t pay – over the years.
P.S. The water came on long enough to fill the house tank. Now it has vanished again. We progress.
There’s no end to human greed and human stupidity, is there?
I hope you’re enjoying Joe Abercrombie. I think his trilogy is the best I’ve read this year. I also hope your shoulder’s better. It must be an epidemic as I’ve been having x-rays and ultrasound for a sore shoulder, too. Turns out it’s a damaged supraspinatus tendon and it will probably take a couple of years to get better! I hope yours is more immediately fixable.
What, exactly, is sand mining anyway?
Ditto about your shoulder, yours too Satima, 2 years isn’t much fun is it?
OH, Satima, poor you – ouch. Mine is better after 2 days.
When I ripped my hip muscles it took 3-4 months of rest and I thought that was bad enough.
Jo, sand-mining is strip mining, often of river banks or river flood plains to get the sand for cement making etc.
How do you girls get these injuries?
Thanks for the explanation Glenda, I thought it was probably something like that but I had never heard of it before.
Glad you had some water coming through, albeit briefly.
My shoulder pain comes and goes, it’s been there on and off for years and no test has yet found out why. I don’t think I want to tempt fate by saying it hasn’t been too bad for a while …