Title: Four dead, 2,000 trapped
Date: 8 December 2008
Sunday Times prime page 2 & 3
Picture is copyrighted and copied from http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/SE%2BAsia/Story/STIStory_311559.html
This article talks about the landslide in Kualar Lumpur that happened 4am yesterday, four is confirmed dead while one other is still suspected to be buried (the article's title on straitstimes.com was five dead, 2,000 trapped instead). I am not sure why the both articles have different titles.
One interesting thing is that in 1993, another landslide had occurred at the Highland towers there which caused 48 deaths, proving that place to be prone to landslides. 15 years later, a landslide did happened yesterday, which just happen to be 5 days short of the 15th anniversary
of the previous landslide.
It was no doubt a tragedy but can we consider that as a natural disaster or something that can be avoided. It was known that this place had high level of risk to have a landslide(or maybe two) and no one did anything about it, a landslide covering 14 bungalows is definitely not a coincidence.
So is everyone nonchalant about it?
At least not for those close to the ones who unfortunately died in the incident. There was a father who went to search the area for his son and called his son's cell phone. To his worst fear he saw a hand sticking out of the rubble holding his son's cell phone which was ringing and receiving the father's call. The hand also belonged to his son.
I felt that the whole incident was a terrible mistake and there is also no one to take responsibility, because economic reasons, home developers used that area for houses and resulted in people dying, are lives so worthless. Effort had not been made to preserve the lives of people but only to developing the economy and other less valuable things. Live to work or work to live?
By: Clement
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