Flood & Blood

RE: Minister Balakrishnan outlines five key areas to deal with flooding

"Personally I think our weather has changed. I'm actually psychologically prepared for it to get worse. You're dealing with nature and you're dealing with the weather, you have to be prepared that there is a limit to human engineering and what we can deliver. But having said that, let us make sure we have done the best we can and within those limits and then cope with whatever else that nature throws at us."

~ Minister of Environment & the Water Resources, 
Vivian Balakrishnan

Erm... Blame Mother Nature again...

If it's really Mother Nature only, by now they would have cited NEA's recorded rainfall trends for 2011 and 10 years before. And not such figures:

"About 65mm of rainfall was recorded within 30 minutes. This was worse than the one on June 16 last year, which had 100mm of rainfall within two hours."

It's not even comparing apples with apples.
And we still do not know whether the weather has really changed. E.g. Can NEA confirm that rainfall rate has never been so high in the history of Singapore?

Don't be tempted to believe that, when a highly-trained surgeon talks about nature, he is being 'scientific' about it.

Remember, this is the same guy who announced the culling of stray cats during SARS in 2003, 'because strays cats are related to civet cats', which were in turn thought to be the origin of the SARS virus.

In fact, he didn't stop the culling even after it was proven that the stray cats were NOT carrying the virus. He quibbled that it was still possible that some stray cats were carrying the damn virus.

Later it was revealed that civet cats are not even cats. They are in fact... similar to freaking raccoons.

In other words, those hundreds of stray cats were slaughtered only because of his mistake. WTF?!!

With an entire ministry advising the Minister (of State), they and he got the species wrong! Extraordinary.

Such callous attitudes... Its consequences are not limited to animals, I tell you. Or perhaps, you are not far from being an animal.

Qn: Why is Singapore flooding so often these days?

While you are never gonna get the official truths, I think the floods are caused by extensive infrastructure works happening in Singapore.

2 greatest contributors are (i) the S$226mil and award-winning Marina Bay Barrage, and (ii) the construction of the multiple MRT lines around the island.

But hey... Who am I to make such conclusions, right?
I ain't no doctor? I ain't no President Scholar? I ain't no (wo)man of science?

The corking of Marina Bay with the Barrage to transform the former into a reservoir sounds good in theory, adding to our water storage supply and creating a wonderfully clean 'lifestyle' body of water right in the middle of the city. So appropriate for our atas first world image. Score point!

But the Barrage does prevent water from flowing from our canal + river system out into the sea naturally like it used to before the Barrage was completed.
You can't argue against something so obvious.

In fact, CEO PUB's latest suggestion to alleviate the flooding problem proves that the Barrage is indeed one of the major causes. He suggested that "a big retention pond could be built to trap some of the peak flows, with a diversion canal from this pond to the Singapore River."

Erm... The Marina Bay has always been the 'retention pond' which Singapore River feeds to. It's huge. The problem is that it has been recently corked with the Barrage in the past few years, i.e. water can no longer flow out into the sea. This recent development coincides with the floods.

Even if the Barrage can be opened to allow water to flow into the sea or water can be pumped into the sea, the flow rate has to be slower than before.

And if the water in the Marina Bay is being treated while it is stored, there is bound to be a reluctance to open the Barrage to let such expensive treated water flow into the sea every time it rains.

It's all-so expensive... And PUB cannot justify the 'returns' for doing so. Just how CEO PUB mentioned in the article that a plausible flood control mechanism such as the building of a retention pond is 'very very expensive'.

This is unlike digging the grounds to build the new MRT lines, where you can drag the Excel spreadsheet columns and claim that such spendings will eventually breakeven. Or quibble your way through that spending S$387mil on YOG = advertising for Singapore and 'good' for Singaporean sports scene.

Building a retention pool to prevent floods is freaking dull and unsexy. *yawn*

Qns: So why did a foreigner (Indonesian boy tourist) drown in Singapore recently? 
Is this an act of Mother Nature too?

The answer is more stoic than one would prefer.

Ans: Because there are more foreigners in Singapore these days.

More foreigners x more floods = More chances of accidents due being unfamiliar with the terrain.