Remember....

Today is the first Saturday in September. How time flies! As i was watching Hurricane Earl on TV, i remembered the storm we experienced in Teluk Intan on Monday. Almost the same time every year, around the end of August or the beginning of September, we sure would experience some form of this type of tropical storm. Well, it was not like a hurricane but the winds were strong enough to cause some forms of damage. Many roofs of houses were being blown off, trees were down. This time around, the winds were strong enough to shift the tiles of my house and water was dripping profusely down from the ceiling. Fortunately, it was confined to one room only. The telephone line in my house was down too. For two days, i could not make any calls nor receive calls. Also, this time around, some parts of town had hail stones too. What a storm....it came suddenly, caused damages to some houses and we were left assessing the destruction. For those people whose roofs were blown off, would have spent quite a bit to replace them. Anyway, storms of such destructive nature were unheard of while i was young then. It was only in the last decade or so we experienced such severe storms. I wonder if this is the consequence of us cutting down forests to make way for housing projects to cause this form of climate change. Also, for the past few years, big trees of more than a hundred years old were being cut down because they were too old. I remembered while i was still teaching then, a new principal would come with ideas of planting lots of trees around the school compound. We teachers would be so happy because it would not be so hot around the school and we had some shade for our cars. After 7 or 8 years when another principal came, he would start cutting down all those trees because he had other ideas. I remembered very vividly the day i went back to school after the long holidays, how bright the whole school compound was, then i realized why....the trees were all gone.