The Malaysian Insight

SELANGOR’S massive unscheduled water cut on Friday is the latest in a series of pollution-triggered crises that demands an overhaul of the country’s management of raw water resources,  the industry regulator said.

This includes addressing corruption among enforcement officers and factory operators, Water Services Commission (SPAN) chairman Charles Santiago said.

The overhaul should start with amendments to the constitution to give federal regulators more powers and oversight over rivers, he told The Malaysian Insight.

This is because 95% of all treated water comes from the rivers but the responsibility of keeping these waterways clean and healthy falls on the state government.

But as seen in the Sungai Selangor water cut on Friday and the pollution of Sungai Kim Kim in Pasir Gudang, Johor, state authorities are either woefully inept, or worse, unwilling to do their jobs properly, Santiago said.

The matter should be tackled at constitutional and federal level as it would be useless to introduce stiffer penalties for pollution without full enforcement, he added.

“The Sungai Selangor, Sungai Kim Kim and Simpang Renggam cases could not have happened without the local councils’ knowledge and without the Department of Environment ‘closing one eye’,” said Santiago who is the Klang MP.

He said a national dialogue on amending the constitution should begin immediately, and must be a collaborative effort.

“The public must shift its mindset and treat water as its most precious resource, otherwise the rivers will continue to be polluted, and we will continue to get these shutdowns,” he added.

More than 1.17 million Selangor households were hit by a water cut on Friday when four of the state’s largest water treatment plants had to be shut down due to pollution in Sungai Selangor.

The plants, Sungai Selangor Phase One, Two and Three, and Rantau Panjang, were closed about 2pm after personnel detected a strong smell emanating from a river in Batang Kali.

The four plants resumed operations yesterday and the state’s water utility, Syabas, said 59% of the water supply had been restored in seven areas as of 4pm.

Efforts are still underway trace the source of the pollution.

Santiago says the latest example of pollution is common throughout the country.

Pasir Gudang residents, for instance, are still reeling from two incidents of poisoning that sent more than a thousand people to the hospitals. Toxic waste was dumped into Sungai Kim Kim, where residential properties and schools stand next to factories without a buffer zone in between .

Although Sungai Kim Kim was not a raw water source like Sungai Selangor, the cases are similar because the river was used as an illegal dumpsite for factories and businesses.

‘Close one eye’

Santiago believes that in both cases, there was a lack of enforcement either because the authorities were either corrupt or understaffed.

By corruption, Santiago said he meant the enforcement authorities had been paid to close one eye to the lack of proper waste management systems.

Industries that produce toxic wastes are required by law to have systems installed to manage and process effluents.

“But since these systems are expensive, some of these companies, mostly small-and-medium-sized, find it cheaper to just pay off the authorities that check their premises.”

They then dump their waste indiscriminately and illegally, including into the rivers, using cheap migrant labour.

“When these companies are caught, they blame the migrant worker for not following the rules. But in reality, the worker was following the system the companies had set,” said Santiago.

To clamp down on them, fines for pollution must be in the “millions”, he added, and jail terms must be imposed.

Fines under current law are only in the hundreds of thousands.

“The companies’ owners and directors must also be black-listed and banned from taking part in the same industry forever.”

Although penalties can be increased and more money could be allocated to the authorities, such measures would be pointless if regulators are corrupt, he said.

“Which is why we have to have a mechanism to monitor and detect corruption among environmental agencies. At the end of the day, the public must also be vigilant and treat pollution as the serious crime it is.” – July 21, 2019.