The lessons from the East Coast oil slick
May 28, 2010
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Sometimes relying on our beloved rag is not so different from bikini logic; the really interesting parts are all covered up, the rest is just what you expect to see – so what I did the day before yesterday was take my bike down to East Coast park just after sunset to check out the oil slick for myself – were there any Bangladeshi power working furious to clean up the gunk? Nope. What about a mobile control center? Nope. Emergency lights? Nope. Gen sets? Nope. In fact, nothing was happening.
Hey I stand corrected but that’s how it was – and you don’t have to be a reincarnation of Einstein to figure out when I say nothing is happening, it means exactly nothing – especially, when you decide to walk up to a few Bangladeshis (about 30 men) standing around impersonating trees with that authoritative look – “Who the hell is in charge of this clean up exercise?” Only to be greeted with that look of “we thought you were in charge.”
Interesting I said to myself, it’s now 7.30 pm and to top it off this event occurred at around 3.00 am the morning before and the response is a big nothing.
In Alice in Wonderland terms, what we may have here is a classic case of “experts,” who are supposed to know what to do during a crisis but have absolutely no idea how to respond to such a crisis; that’s to say they are supposed to be trained to evaluate and chart the best course of action to quantify the known knowns and known unknowns. But since they don’t know what to do the response is to do nothing.
You see I just happen to be an efficiency expert; that is what I do for keeps – I write long comatose inducing reports on manufacturing firms that stock broking firms (though I suspect, its read by less than 10 people) regularly use to make an informed decision to either buy, hold or sell stocks abt firms in the S & P that regularly produce everything from combine harvesters to vibrating toys that give lonely spinsters pleasure during cold winter nights – and I can tell you all for a fact from what I’ve been able to make out; on the balance of probabilities NEA did not have any contingency plans to deal effectively with this oil slick. I challenge you directly! There was no template. No standard operational procedure. Nothing!
Hey, as I said, I stand corrected – but that’s the way I see it and you all know that I always call a spade a spade.
Now this is very odd to me, since we aren’t a landlocked country like Montenegro and we are surrounded by water from North, East, South and West – added to that, we regularly have supertankers and vessels that ferry everything from cocoa butter, sweet crude not to mention the odd Nimitz class aircraft carries that secrets weapons grade uranium plying our waters – and you are telling me that no one in NEA ever bothered coming up with a rapid response plan to deal with such a worse case scenario?
You are kidding me right?
Instead what we got from the authorities was a mixture of comic relief and sham that just beggars the imagination – when asked how the containment efforts are coming along – the MPA replied, unpredictable wind and tide conditions had made containment difficult, even though the weather was fine – Oh silly me, why didn’t I realize that an oil slick can be so different from a pack of marauding rats where all we had to do was pay the piped piper to lead them all to the nearest oil sump?
Anyone who knows the sea will testify that she is at best a capricious woman and at worse a siaow charbor (mad woman) – she can’t help herself – the moon affects her – OF COURSE OIL SLICKS ARE UNPREDICTABLE! THAT IS WHY THEY ARE CALLED OIL SLICKS DUMMY!
The one comment that really takes the rubber dodo award of the year comes from the NEA’s director of environmental health who quipped a la non chalant savior faire style, that those affected by the smell were probably more sensitive. He went on to add, “Durian could have the same effect on some people.”
Hey, I got news for you man. I have absolutely no idea where you’re getting your durians from, but it’s certainly not NTUC man? You best go for a stool test just to check yourself out for irritable bowel syndrome.
Some of us nearly pengsan while cycling through those affected areas– I am not kidding, couldn’t even keep my eyes open and had it not been for copious amounts of tiger balm and eye mo in our medical bag, some of us would probably be in the ICU with medical grade tubing sticking out from our body parts.
So it’s really sad to see a senior official making light of what is obviously a very serious environmental problem – if I was the PM, I would reward this lackadaisical official with a permanent posting to man a weather station somewhere in the Arctic where the only oil slick he would be managing is trying to figure out how to make his sesame oil runny when the temp falls below minus 40!
Next time NEA come with a rapid response plan! This was a relative small oil spill but the next one that hits us may very well be a mother. Get with it! You have no possible idea how much I am holding back on the punches….no idea whatsoever.
Well let’s take a look cars that cannot even drive without the steering wheel coming loose; lousy customer service from the civil service and a private sector that cannot even speak proper English – how is that possible? Where did it all go so wrong?
I want you all to think long and hard about this. Let me share with all of you the tragedy of the commons, the story I like to call the empire of the bones – had Mahathir been a Kendo exponent, he would have realized that before real social change can occur the skeleton key that makes this transformation possible does not lie in learning new thoughtware. Think about it. Before you can put in something new into your head, you first have to unlearn many things that is already up there, some of those things may even be so encrusted and fossilized that you may have to take a sledge hammer to them – and that is the clearest expression of the being that makes up the art of Kendo in the Hagakure stable – from the first dan to the third dan, you don’t learn as much as unlearn – it is only in the fourth dan that you begin to learn how to kill proficiently in seven steps, that is why kata is so important in the grading in the fourth.
You unlearn that – pain though inevitable, but suffering is optional. You unlearn that winning is good, but losing gracefully is even better; you unlearn, unlearn, unlearn and unlearn.
Had Mahathir spent one year in the dojo somewhere in the mountains doing nothing all day except waking up in the morning and slicing the wind with a shinai all day long (bamboo sword) Malaysia today would be a giant like South Korea or Taiwan.
That in short is what I call the shattered dreams that is Malaysia then and today – she is a country that has aped the form without really understanding that content is what makes up the form.” – Darkness 2003
Extracted by an auto-bot crawler from the Book of Ages – under the Chapter: The Empire of the Bones – the Brotherhood Press 2010.
