Monday, October 06, 2008

Grease Traps - Letter to Press


LETTER TO PRESS

6 October, 2008

Dear Sir,

I would be most grateful if you could allow me to use your Readers’ page to express my disappointment at the lack of responsibility in some of our government servants and the complete absence of accountability.

In this instance, I would like to only touch on grease traps as an illustration.

To protect our waterways like rivers, lakes, seas, etc., grease traps are mandatory at all eateries. It is bad enough that these are not inspected periodically to make sure that they serve the purpose they were intended for. How could an outlet not having any grease trap be licensed in the first place?




May I ask, isn’t this negligence of duty or corruption or both? Shouldn’t the person who approved the licencing of such outlets be taken to task by the department? Is this the case of the top can’t care less and the bottom just have a field day? When one is made aware of the rampant violations of laws and orders in this country one cannot help but feel that accountability does not exist.

Instead of having more NGOs taking an active part in projects like “Love Our Drains”, “Love Our rivers” and “Love Everything Under the Sun”, we should have only one campaign i.e. make the public servants have a career-long campaign called “Love Our Jobs”. This is to remind them that unless they perform they will be sacked without any exception. This should be more stringently applied to the heads than the subordinates.




In Section 7 Petaling Jaya, only a handful of outlets have grease traps working. Most of them have grease traps that are not maintained and some even without any installed. Ideally, all drain-outlets to rivers, lakes and all bodies of waters should have heavy-duty grease traps installed by the local authorities. This is to ensure even discharges from households and other outlets that are not required to install grease traps do not contaminate our lakes, rivers, etc.

After privatisation, we now have NGOs carrying out all sorts of gotong royong projects, is there anything left for the government servants to do, besides collecting money?

Sincerely,

Jack Lim
Vice President
Friends of Kelana Jaya Park