dam building

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Midweek

On the long-term prospects of short sight - New Straits Times

By Rehman Rashid

 

June 5: WORK is progressing on the great new dam being built on the Sungai

Selangor just seven km up the road from a hamlet ominously named Ampang

Pecah ( " Broken Dam " ).

 

Moves are afoot, I'm told, to have that place-name changed to something less

evocative of the 1889 damburst that swept away everything of old Kuala Kubu

that wasn't perched on the knoll now displaying the pretty little township

of Kuala Kubu Baru.

 

Of course, the RM2.5 billion Sg Selangor Dam will be light-years beyond the

earthen dike that collapsed in the 19th century, but it might as well be

made of spit and sand for the ire it raised among our conservationists and

nature-lovers.

 

Concerted and impassioned protests were mounted against the project. The

residents of Kuala Kubu Baru attended the presentations of NGOs and other

concerned parties, dutifully perusing the official environmental impact

assessment and its several rebuttals.

 

But they did not whole-heartedly lend their own voices to the protests. This

recalcitrance was not entirely rooted in " fear of reprisals " , as the more

supercilious activists suggested.

 

To be sure, the old families of KKB, more than most, have long experience of

security regulations. Theirs was among the last " black areas " in the country

to be declared " white " after the Communist insurgency, which began in

earnest with the 1951 assassination of British High Commissioner Henry

Gurney just 29km up the road from KKB to Fraser's Hill.

 

Partly as a consequence of the Emergency, Kuala Kubu Baru has long been home

to the Royal Malaysian Police Academy and the Army's 21st Commando Regiment.

The town has grown into a disciplined, orderly and safe place, populated by

multi-generational families with an historic understanding of the sacrifices

necessary for peace and security.

 

This was not, however, the principal reason for the residents' unprotesting

acceptance of the new dam. The truth was, many of KKB's old families now

have descendants living and working in the Klang Valley, and they were moved

and distressed by the water shortages suffered by their descendants in that

conurbation in recent years.

 

Their children and grandchildren had done well, they thought, building

lives, careers and families in the big city, owning nice cars and living in

modern condominiums with swimming pools. It grieved the old folk to see

their upwardly mobile offspring lining up at those swimming pools to fill

buckets of water for their household needs.

 

So the people of KKB accepted the dam as a solution to that problem.

 

They also acknowledged that the dam site — a deep and narrow gorge — would

result in a relatively small area of inundation. The 100m-deep lake formed

by the Sg Selangor dam would have a surface area of less than seven square

kilometres, making it about one-fortieth as vast as, say, Kenyir Lake in

Terengganu.

 

Moreover, such dam-made lakes as Kenyir and Kedah's Pedu became tourist

attractions in their own right, with holiday resorts and watersports

facilities bringing financial benefits and entrepreneurial opportunities to

their districts. With Hulu Selangor well-known for adventure sports such as

jungle trekking, rock-climbing, mountain biking and river rafting, many KKB

locals eagerly anticipated such prospects.

 

There was also the immediate boost to the local economy from feeding,

sheltering and supplying the dam's hundreds of workers for the five years of

construction. This has already enhanced the prosperity of that little town

with rising land values, new businesses and refurbished shop-houses.

 

Then there was the matter of the relocation of two Orang Asli villages,

Gerachi and Pertak, comprising some 100 Temuan families. They now live in

nice new houses perched on hilltops with what will be splendid lake views.

 

Visiting urbanites express envy at the Temuans' new homes, wishing they

could live in such salubrious surroundings. They might yet be able to.

Precedents have been set in Pahang granting the Orang Asli title to their

property, which if extended to the Temuan of Hulu Selangor may mean they can

eventually sell their houses if they wish.

 

The Temuan's standard of living has also been raised by the monetary

compensation they received for their old rubber and fruit trees, which were

sold for timber or left to be drowned by the rising waters of the dam.

 

Alas, such positivism has not ended there. The newly denuded slopes sweeping

down from Kampung Gerachi Jaya to what will be the future lakeshore have

been planted with oil palm.

 

At this point, this writer finds it a little less easy being an apologist

for this project. The Temuan cannot eat oil palm fruit, nor sell it by the

roadside. They have no experience in oil palm cultivation, nor the

inclination to develop it. Unlike with pomelos, durian or petai, oil palm

demands extensive experience in agro-industrial management and intensive use

of fertilisers, pesticides and weedicides.

 

Oil palm fruit bunches are the very devil to harvest. They are huge and

heavy; they shake the ground when they fall, even from those short,

big-bunched " Dolly Parton " varieties. Moreover, steep hill slopes are the

least suitable terrain for oil palm, as anyone would know who's ever seen a

40kg fruit bunch hit the ground and barrel downhill with harvesters

frantically leaping out of its way.

 

Finally, productive oil palm cultivation in Malaysia requires four times

more fertiliser than rubber, six times more than rice and eight times more

than cocoa. Without advanced and expensive techniques of terrain contouring

and soil preparation, much of those fertilisers, weedicides and pesticides

may run off down those steep slopes — in this case, directly into the

drinking water to be supplied to the Klang Valley.

 

The Orang Asli's new land could have been given over to the cultivation of

fruit trees, flowers, herbs and medicinal plants, which is almost certainly

how the Temuan themselves would have chosen to use their new land, had they

been given the choice. Compelling them into oil palm culti-vation may be the

most wrong-headed and short-sighted development in this entire saga.

 

There is no consolation in knowing that those who conceived and implemented

this scheme may also eventually be drinking the chemical-laden water seeping

off their grand ambitions.

 

 

 

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