Flooding and heritage – there’s a link
Letter from Vinita Ramani Mohan, 15 Jun 2011.
AS A resident of Bukit Timah, there are two issues that I have been following closely over the past year. The first is the intermittent flash floods and the second is the closure in two weeks of the Tanjong Pagar and Bukit Timah railway stations and the return of the Malayan railway land to Singapore.
Though the two issues at first glance seem unrelated, they both pertain to our natural environment and how rapidly the landscape of Singapore is changing.
A recent letter to Today provided a refreshingly intelligent perspective that aptly connected to The Nature Society’s proposal “The Green Corridor – A Proposal to Keep the Railway Lands as a Continuous Green Corridor”.
Source: TODAY
Green lungs to quell floods
Letter from Liew Kai Khiun, TODAY, 8 Jun 2011.
IT SEEMS certain that the islandwide floods are getting more routine as last year’s images of submerged roads, water-choked basement car parks and ankle-deep waters in malls returned to haunt us on Sunday morning.
In spite of the extensive drainage work undertaken over the decades, the authorities have conceded that no amount of preparation can stop such freak floods that are attributed predominantly to global warming and “acts of nature”.
Nonetheless, I would also like to draw a correlation between the floods and the high growth rates of the past few years, rapid urbanisation resulting from the property boom and the spike in population. Hence, the problems are not only global and natural but also local and man-made. Read more
