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I couldn't agree more with Lim Khoon Boon's LRT breakdown not taken seriously . I, too, was one of those trapped on July 24 on the LRT trains between the Pasar Seni and Masjid Jamek stations and am disgusted by the way the emergency was handled.

It is one thing to have to go through this, it is another when you (eventually) get evacuated and there is not a single apology - not when we got off the train, not even publicly through the media. There was no one even checking if we were okay or if we needed any assistance after walking back along the tracks to the station.

In fact, I saw one LRT staff member arguing with one of the passengers about how he had to manage 38 trains or whatever and she only had to worry about one! Excuse me? Either the staff have never had any training on how to handle emergencies or they really just couldn't care less.

The banal announcement about 'staying calm' and 'help is one its way' wore thin and that's when people started to get agitated. The air got hotter, thicker in the stalled trains and it got harder to breathe. Some people on the train then prised the door open so we could breathe easier.

So it irked me to hear the authorities treat this as 'impatience' on the part of the passengers. For those who think it's so 'biasa', try being in a jam-packed, driver-less train stuck on a slope, with no air for one hour, then walk along a narrow track disoriented from the lack of oxygen and see if you don't feel like seeing a few heads roll.

The LRT people really do not have the high moral ground on this considering their abysmal incompetence in handling the situation - they owe us an apology.

The emergency services were another joke. I rang a friend who rang the emergency number. Fat lot of good that did. First of all, it took forever for someone to answer the phone. And when they did, they asked my friend to ring some other number!

And we, the nation, are imagining ourselves handling a tsunami. We can't even handle a stuck train right.

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