Within the period of two days, two landslides caused much damage and death in Kuala Lumpur. This perhaps might not have made such major headlines had it not occurred just a few days to the 15th anniversary of the Highland Towers tragedy, which caused the deaths of 48 people. Terry wrote on the Highland Towers: On Saturday, December 11, 1993, at about 1.30 pm, after 10 days of continuous rainfall, a landslide was triggered. Mud slipped into the basements of Block 1 and hence shifting the entire base of the building, hence the entire block collapsed, trapping residents inside. When the rescue operation was called off after days of searching, 48 people were recorded dead. Many countries like Japan and the US sent professionals to help the rescuers here to get trapped victims out from the collapsed rubble. The nation (Malaysia) declared this incident a national tragedy. Immediately after the collapse of Block 1 the residents of Blocks 2 and 3 were prevented from entering their apartments by the local authority having jurisdiction of the area, the Majlis Perbandaran Ampang Jaya (MPAJ), for fear of the instability of these two buildings. A couple of days later, these occupants were allowed in, in restricted numbers, but only to collect their personal valuables. At that time, even with the presence of the security forces, the apartments were looted. With the eventual passing of time especially when security was reduced and subsequently withdrawn altogether, vandalism became more intense. By 1998, when this court visited the site, every apartment in Blocks 2 and 3 was completely stripped of contents, including fittings leaving only the naked structure. Image of recent landslide courtesy of www.syahrinaziz.com The first of the recent landslides occurred at a commercial area where buildings were perched on a hillslope. Jeff, an eyewitness, wrote on his blog: It happen when I was going through the issues log, suddenly there is a loud noise and the whole building is shaking. Since I have already noticed the cracks on the road few days ago, I knew in an instance that the road must have collapsed after the heavy rain in the afternoon. *Lucky it didn't fell earlier when I was running by from car park in the heavy rain (else it might scare the hell out of me)* As usual, everyone is running out from the building to see what have happen, I did the same except I grab along my Ricoh GRDII… …and that is what I saw… Image of recent landslide courtesy of Kokstang Disaster struck again two days later at Bukit Antarabangsa, in the vicinity of the Highland Towers Tragedy, in a residential area. This time, the landslide killed at least four people, with seven missing on the first day, 15 injured, 14 bungalows destroyed and 4,000 people evacuated from the area. Image of recent landslide courtesy of www.syahrinaziz.com The Lifeballade blog had this post: Do they learn what had happened in 1993?? Highland Tower collapsed and many [sic] died [sic] when this collapsed, children, adults, old people. What have the developers had done for all these years?? With this accident, don’t they still choose not to believe this is our earth calling for help? My heart shrunk when I saw the piece of news where the husband uses his bare hands to dig the earth to find his wife. The wife managed to save all her children, but she was not able to get out from it, and was buried alive. Why were developers built those houses near the hill? Why were those hill cutting projects approved? Why none of these people understand the greenery is important to our earth? Image of recent landslide courtesy of Edreenchenart State assemblywoman, Elizabeth Wong, wrote on her blog: One of the earliest policy decision made by the new Selangor state govt of Pakatan Rakyat was to throw out any housing and building applications on Class 3 and Class 4 hillslopes, in order to preserve environmentally sensitive areas and prevent the recurrence of landslides. This was decided on April 2, 2008 Executive Council meeting. Selangor became the first and only state in the Federation to have complied with the Federal Town and Country Planning Department’s “Total Planning Guidelines” 1997 (2nd edition, 2001) which states that no housing development should be allowed on 25 degrees and above gradient slopes. Developers thought it was a late April Fool’s joke. Since our ban, they have used all means – the media, blogs, lobbying of ADUNs and MPs etc. to change of our minds. We were labelled and villified as “anti-business” and “anti-development”. I have even had some of our Pakatan MPs asking us to make exceptions for Class 3. And every couple of months, we have to repeat our policy decision again.