The 1998 Klang Valley water crisis occurred in Malaysia in February 1998 when the three reservoir dams in Klang Valley, Klang Gates Dam, Batu Dam and Semenyih Dam suffered a substantial drop in water level following the El Niño phenomenon. The subsequent water shortage affected almost all the residents in the Klang Valley causing the government to impose water rationing prior to the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur.
The shortage was blamed on El Nino despite actual rainfall in the months leading up to February 1998 in Federal Territory not being significantly below average. In fact in November 1997, Klang Gates Dam had its highest recorded rainfall. Similarly in October 1997 the Kajang station not far from the Semenyih dam had its highest rainfall in record.
Famous quotes containing the words valley, water and/or crisis:
“All the Valley quivered one extended motion, wind
undulating on mossy hills”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)
“The woman ... turned her melancholy tone into a scolding one. She was not very young, and the wrinkles in her face were filled with drops of water which had fallen from her eyes, which, with the yellowness of her complexion, made a figure not unlike a field in the decline of the year, when the harvest is gathered in and a smart shower of rain has filled the furrows with water. Her voice was so shrill that they all jumped into the coach as fast as they could and drove from the door.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)