The recent flood has come and gone, and very soon it will be forgotten. However, for those who lost their assets and money, not to mention destruction of their cars and homes, the effect will be hard to forget, let alone those who have lost their lives.

As expected, committees have been formed, and just like all committees before, they will prepare lots of papers and proposals and have numerous meetings before any action can be taken.

In the meanwhile, forests will still be cleared, hills will be cut and mining pools will still be reclaimed. The government will blame the squatters (rightly so in many instances) and the squatters will continue to dump rubbish in the rivers, simply because there is no other way to dispose of their rubbish, in the first place.

In other words, the government will never take the blame!

However, every day, the Land Office will receive applications for state land from well-connected people, for purposes of logging or development. Most of the time this land, once approved will immediately be sold to other parties at a hefty profit.

Due to the high cost of the 'purchase' price, the developer will try to maximise the utilisation of the land. Drains and green areas are considered non-income-generating items in the project, and therefore must be minimised.

When one travels along the Lebuhraya Damansara Puchong (LDP) one will realise that at certain stretches, we would be travelling on what were mining pools that have been filled with soil. Most of these pools served a very important purpose, i.e. to receive excess water during heavy downpours, but have been alienated to certain parties and then resold to build the LDP.

Then travel to KLIA, and one can see somewhere on the left, a pool being slowly filled to accommodate some sort of development. So where do we go from here? Unless the government is really serious, stops blaming others all the time and rethinks its land alienation programme and approvals of 'development', expect more and worse floods in the future.