Devine Intervention

7:38 pm, just after light dinner of duck rice at SuperTanker food court at Lip Sin Garden.
Waiting for my 8:30 meeting. It's too long a ride to go home and come again.
Earlier in the afternoon, a colleague phoned me  : "Are you going? I thought our work already done, taken care of by the various DVCs? If you're not going, I'm also not going". I said my intention is to go ... for reasons best not revealed here.

But after dinner I took a walk around the two lakes on campus. Over the weekend, it gain notoriety in the local press. Everyone pointed their fingers at the USM retention pond for causing the floods along Sg. Dua. There was a huge downpour and the ponds overflowed.

A few chaps were quite happy because along with the flood water came the tilapia and jelawat fishes struggling in the shallow water along the road outside USM. They got their nets and got free fish for dinner. Ah, but some biologist told me once the fish in the lake is really not fit for consumption.

One apartment just outside of the campus also got flooded. Pictures in the press showed a car submerged up to its roof. Poor guy. Usually, the guards at the condo would alert the residents to remove their cars to higher ground after one hour of rain.

Residents there too blamed USM for not taking care of the problem. They said they complained before.

Some elected member of parliament or state assemblyman immediately jumped in and said USM should dig another hole. And the DID chief seemed to think its USM's problem too, saying that the university should deepen the ponds.

And what did USM say? The public relations guy said the only thing that would not get a good public lashing. "We will work with the relevant departments to solve the problem".

Looks like another bigger headache on top of the alga bloom.

Speaking of which, the green alga is all gone! The water in the two lakes are now earthen brown.

Wow, all it took was a few hours of heavy rain to get rid of the problem.

But don't be too happy. Just wait awhile. The alga bloom will come back. We still have not resolved the problem. Low water flow on most days. Rubbish and pollutants flowing in from outside. And wrong design - one pond has inlet but no outlet. And of course, one problem is that it is shallow and silting up.

But I think the biggest loser are the people who pumped in more than a hundred thousand to experiment with use of bio-enzymes to solve the problem. The experiment is all screwed up now. They will have to wait for the next alga bloom to come back and start the experiment all over again.

Or will they just claim victory.

Now I know one reason why the mouth of the river at Tanjung Bungah could miraculously become spotlessly clean.