I refer to the Malaysiakini report Bukit Antarabangsa landslide report declassified .

Since the Bukit Antarabangsa residents affected by the landslide of December 2008 are talking about seeking compensation, they should first be clear on who should be held responsible for the landslide so that they do not waste time and money chasing after the wrong party.

According to the JKR main report, water from leaking water pipes most probably triggered the landslide.

However, no evidence or argument has been offered to support this conclusion apart from the observation that pipes were reported to be broken about two hours before the landslide.

One has to ask if water from these leaking pipes could sufficiently soak such a big area in such a short time to trigger such a big landslide. Or is it being suggested that the pipe had burst a long time ago and water only appeared at the ground surface just before the landslide?

Yet the report failed to make such a connection between cause and effect. Is it not more likely that the pipes were broken because of the landslide? In other words, has ‘cause’ been mistaken for ‘effect’?

The report recounted the long history of instability of this slope. In December 1984, houses being built on it had to be abandoned because of a landslide. Some eventually collapsed for the same reason about a year later.

There is also reference to the Ulu Klang Ampang Hazard Assessment Study carried out in January 2008 which stated that ‘…it is clear that the soil at the landslide location was creeping and showing signs of instability’.

A geo-technical design report dated 2006 also reported similar signs of distress. Taking all these into consideration, it is clear that the burst pipe is just a consequence and not the cause of the failure.

The underlying cause of failure was the way the slope had been constructed - by dump filling. Many slopes have been built this way and many of them will fail for the same reason.

It is unfortunate that the JKR report fails to highlight this as the primary factor and merely lumps it together with other causes repeating the usual mantra of prolonged rainfall, poorly-maintained or damaged drains, and development of cracks on the slope. In the process it fails to discern between cause and effect.

The contents of the report also raise several important issues of which I will only address one in this letter: why was no action taken or warning sounded despite at least two reports of instability preceding the event?

Have the ‘experts’ undertaking these studies failed to realise the significance of their findings or are they only good at pointing out ‘causes’ after the event but not before?

Or has someone been sitting on these reports hoping that the problem will go away or that he would have gone by the time the inevitable happens?

If these consultants have indeed failed to sound the warning, the least they should do is to return their fees collected for a job badly done. If they did their job and some government official sat on the report, let us identify him and haul him up.