Flood Prone Sibu.

My mother lived in several houses during her life time. She used to tell us that as she grew older she was most terrified of floods because they brought snakes and all sorts of creepy crawlies into the house.

It was a trauma which affected her life . She would watch the rising water in the Rajang and any of the drains nearby. Her fears would start to develop when she saw the rain coming down and  the rising water which relentlessly reached the stair cases of the stilted houses she lived in, She was terrified by flood water which entered the ground floor of our Sungei Merah house.

She was born in a small wooden house along the Rajang, near the Chung Cheng School. That was where my grandfather started to slash and burn the jungles for his elder brother. It was a shared investment for the two brothers. Later after having cut down enough trees and cleared enough land, my grandfather started to slash and burn, and cleared land for his own family. The Foochow pioneers called this " tiak chu" or move out of the family unit financially and physically. She could not remember most of her young days there.

The Nang Chong house was built by  my maternal grandfather. The family moved to the house around 1930. She experienced the over spilling of the Rajang a few times a year. The house was on stilt so she was never worried about flood water getting into the house. When the flood rose, she and her sister in law would quickly carry pails of water into the house to wash all the planks and scrub them well. It was good to give the plank floor a good rub.

(This big house collapsed and was washed away by the pounding waves brought by the expresses. By that time no one lived in the house as all the families had moved to Sibu. I remember visiting my grandmother after I was married and had my eldest child. It was such a big house that when kids ran around upstairs playing hide and seek and other games, we could hear our own echoes.)

For a while after she married my father, she lived in one of the two first floor flats in Lido Theatre. On the first floor of the building, she was never afraid of floods. living there. She felt the security of living in town. But floods did come to the streets in 1948.

Mum moved to her fourth house in Pulau Kerto when my grandfather moved to Sungei Merah and my father had to look after the Ice Factory. And her greatest fear would start again when flood water came up near the upper stair case. She had seen big snakes swimming to eat ducks, chickens and even goats. She was always scared of snakes.

After moving to Sibu town, the family lived in Brooke Drive for a long time, even after my father passed away. Here in this house my mother never had to be afraid of floods coming into the house.

The final house she lived in was the Sungei Merah house, which was also in a low lying part of the town. Every year, she would be terrified by the impending floods.

She told us that she was even afraid of floods in her dreams. 

It was a lot of hard work to clean the house after a flood.

Floods get into a lot of houses in Sibu especially at the end of the year.