Monday 20 November 2017

Penang's great floods, part 2


It just came to my mind that I should perhaps separate my original post on Penang's great floods into two stories; the first one several days ago to describe my own experience with the flood that I missed and the second one here to show some rather disturbing pictures that emerged from the floods and the aftermath.

I was at a friend's hair salon yesterday and he related that the flood waters had risen about six inches into his shop at the Anson Road end of Seang Tek Road during that fateful weekend. But the floods had also affected his own single-storey home in Caunter Hall as he was chest deep in water. Together with his cousin who was staying with him, they had to make sure that his mother was safely perched on a table throughout the night. His car was submerged and he is now debating whether to get it repaired - an estimated cost is something in the region of RM20,000-plus with no guarantee that nothing else could go wrong with the engine in the next year or so - or scrap it off and buy another one.

If his end of Seang Tek Road could be so badly affected, I'm sure the other end of the road, where I stayed during my childhood, would have been severely flooded too. The Dato Kramat Road end of Seang Tek Road is basically a basin and I do recollect that the road outside the house my grandparents rented could flood after huge storms. There were at least four or five occasions when the flood waters then had even swept into the house. It seemed that the monsoon drain at Dato Kramat Road, huge and deep though it was, could simply not cope with the gush of water. My friend told me that even Dato Kramat Road itself was flooded.

This is Malacca Street.


Even the roofs had been blown off in the storm.

The beached ferry at the Butterworth terminal.

This huge sinkhole formed near the Surin Condominium in Tanjong Bungah affecting a nearly completed housing project.











No comments: