Burn…

It has been hot and sunny for a week or so now. It certainly looks like the rain has gone and hopefully, we will be spared of the nuisance of floods for a long while.

But looking at the extreme weather conditions that countries across the world are experiencing, I had mentioned in a previous post that there is every possibility that we will experience exceedingly hot temperatures  resulting from global warming and in the wake of such dry conditions, the dreaded haze.

Well, it certainly did not take long for the other day, I spotted this in our local Sibu English daily…

They have had dry and hot weather over in the peninsular for a while now, all that time when those of us here were being drenched day in day out and plagued by floods again and again. Nevertheless, I am sure some, if not all, have noticed that despite it being sunny these few days around these parts, it is also somewhat a bit hazy.

I saw on the news on TV that several hotspots have been spotted in Riau, Indonesia…and we do not even have to look that far. Just take a drive around the housing areas in the evening and what do you see? People burning leaves, grass and what not in their gardens! Somebody mentioned once that it seemed to be the favourite past-time of people here!

Open burning is banned in the country and so is the playing of fireworks and firecrackers…and when the children see with their own eyes, their own parents blatantly breaking the law, what kind of values do you think they are implanting in the kids’ innocent minds? Laws are made to be broken?

And if they do not give a damn what kind of future generation they are grooming, they should at least give some thought for the environmental problems that seem to get more and more serious each passing year. When they are choking in the haze or drowning in the flood, they should realise that they themselves are to blame and should not be pointing their fingers left, right and centre at everybody except themselves.

Of course, the authorities too, on their part, should play their part in enforcing the laws. Why bother saying that firecrackers are banned in the country when the deafening noise raged on and on for 15 days and 15 nights and nobody batted an eyelid, it seemed? Come to think of it, if those things are banned, how did those people manage to get hold of them? It looks like certain parties in our midst have “very tainted hands”, don’t you think? Well, I do not reckon we will get to hear the explosions anymore for the time being, but somebody should drive around in the evenings and the  very instant, they spot somebody burning something, simply slap them with a heavy fine! No questions asked, no excuses entertained! Singapore, they say, is a FINE city! If they can do it, why can’t we?

They say that works on the flood menace will start in March. That, we will have to wait and see! Sedimentation in the drain outside my house has rendered it so very shallow and nothing has been done about it for a long, long time now…

Sometime ago, they used to come very regularly to dig up the drain but I have not seen anybody doing that for a number of years now. I wonder if that has anything to do with the chairman of the municipal council at the time living in the lane next to mine, but he has since moved away to some place else? The other day, I saw some women doing something in the drains in some other lanes and putting stuff in white canvas bags to be carted away subsequently…but not in my lane.

As you can see in the photo, the drain is presently about two feet deep  only and with the excessive amount of rain we get these days – lately it never rains, it pours – is it any wonder at all that it will get filled up in no time at all and start spilling onto the roads and driveways and into the houses? I suppose they are not in the least bothered as long as that  gigantic luxurious bungalow round the corner stays comfortably high and dry…

P.S.:  Notice from WordPress
We will be making some code changes in about 44 hours which will log you out of your WordPress.com account. They should only take a few seconds and you should be able to log in afterwards without any problems… Hopefully, it will not affect my daily blogging routine.