Heroes of the moment

It happened seven years ago. Today, I came across this old picture among my images on facebook. It was about a mountain guide - Ridwan was his name - who was carrying an injured boy on the back while descending Mount Kinabalu. The area had been hit by an earthquake on 5 June 2015 and the quake, measuring 6.0 on the Richter scale, had caused some 18 deaths (including a 30-year-old guide, Rubbi Sapinggi, from Kampung Kiau) and serious injuries among many climbers on that morning.

We would think that Malaysia was well insulated from the Pacific Ring of Fire and the typhoon zone but actually, not. Quite often, we are affected by the tail-end of typhoons that sweep across the Bay of Bengal or the South China Sea. Less often, we experience slight tremors from earthquakes that shake Sumatra or Mindanao. But there was an earthquake in Sabah itself in 2015. It occurred along a rather dormant fault line there which moved and released the energy within it. And anyway, Sabah is closer to the Ring of Fire than the peninsula.

Thus, at 7.15am on 5 June 2015, the fault line moved and shook the whole mountain. One of the Donkey Ears peaks at the summit broke off in the process. The huts and buildings at Laban Rata shook and suffered some damage. The trails on the mountain were damaged by the quake until rendered impassable to normal hikers. But the mountain guides knew the ins-and-outs of the mountain and they responded admirably to the situation. Guides like Ridwan went up the mountain several times to help bring down the dead and injured. 

Lynn Siang, a tour agency spokeswoman, characterised the mountain guides as heroes. "The main rescue work was done by the mountain guides," she had told CNN then. "On the path that was blocked by fallen rocks, the mountain guides had to tie a rope. When climbers crossed the ropes, they had to step on the shoulders of the guides -- the guides used their body as a cushion. They really have sacrificed a lot," Siang said, before evoking the name of the guide who didn't make it. "Rubbi -- he sacrificed a lot."

Today, the earthquake is only a memory but pictures such as this keep surfacing on my facebook on the anniversaries of my posting them. They are reminders of the times when tragedy struck the nation and unsung heroes like Ridwan and many, many others came to the fore as heroes of the day and then subsequently are forgotten again. Well not today as I salute them!