the wrath of god

1. it gutted me to the fullest extent, hearing the landslide tragedy occurred less than 48 hours ago, which happens less than 10 miles from my apartment.

2. it gutted me, that we had a similar tragedy exactly 15 years ago, that we faced exactly the same incident. and it takes 15 bodies or more, and that's just reported, to essentially sacrificed themselves to death , all for nothing.

3. are we stupid, or just plain ignorant. somehow i can conclude that lives are cheap. for a developing country, lives here are cheap. since we can say malaysia is acceptably peaceful, but it's the easiest country to die in.

4. we are not intellectually challenged people as compared in the 70's , 80's . in fact, we are much more complex, educated, and should learn from past tragedies. yet we still allow these tragedies to happen.

5. do we blame god for the landslide ? for the love of god, no . god does not clear trees or put piles for development. god is not a civil engineer. god is too great for that. we, at least for the past hundred years of intellectual evolution, should have understood or at least predict this tragedy at least in the engineering scale.

6. i'm not a geologist, but i can observe by common sense that these can be predicted by simply prevention. i've been to the site (bukit antarabangsa) before, and i can just say it is simply risky. i had a chat with one geologist said to me that ampang hills is the most unstable structure within klang valley. and terrifyingly it's just not only bukit antarabangsa.

7. from an engineering point of view, by geographically bukit antarabangsa is just a part of the hills among the hills that houses the largest water supply in the klang valley, or the langat river. knowing that malaysia is the most wettest country in the world (and it rains almost every day) , that's a lot of liquid to store. generally, it does't just rain and stores to the river like a bath tub, actually it requires a network of hills to catch rainwater so that it will converge to a group of water paths to flow what we essentially know as a river.

8. hills typically need trees to support them structurally and provide flow pathways to allow the catchment waters to flow gravitationally down. owing to the condition whereby trees' roots are naturally branches into large networks, it is naturally the best path providers to these waters to flow.

9. what happens if these trees are idiotically cut down? i'm not a tree hugger but i do know that we should not cut trees without knowing the consequences. if the trees are cut down, these root branches would eventually die, and leaves and branches would not able to absorb the drop intensity of rain to allow it to absorb in the soil more effectively.

10. the porosities and permeabilities of the soil structure would dangerously be blocked. due to the overburden weight of the underlaying soil on top, these soils would compacted to behave as clays. the top soils would absorb a lot of water, while the deeper layers would not. these top soils would be very unstable, as it stores a lot of water, and behave like a really thick mud. you would not realize it because it does not look like mud. in fact it looks exactly the same soil as you would look everyday. with some grass, you would be fooled totally.

11. these mobile wet soil layers would just take only time for it to be physically active. until a certain water saturation, these soil layers would not move. but then, the more frequent the rain pours, the higher the water saturation and higher the chances for these soil layers to move.

12. until come a perfect day, where in fact it doesn't rain that much but it has triggered the 'critical water saturation' soil structure for it to become mobile. when it happens, that's where we know it as a landslide. as you know, it behaves like an avalanche: the movement of the top soil would typically accumulate gravitationally until its energy become large enough be come destructive, destroying everything that comes to its path. that includes expensive bungalow lots.

13. i dare say that the landslides can be prevented way before until it takes body counts to occur. yes, some people or readers would say that why should they care, or why am i so interested in landslides. well, for me it can happen to anyone. what if, somebody you know or care, died instantly during a landslide ? how would you react. the poor departed souls would be fucking pissed if they realized that they died out of somebody's wrong doing.

14. i wish that the departed souls would come back haunt these corrupt officers starting from the jabatan tanah, and all the way up to the politicians. let them haunt their souls and torture them out of their very lives.