KUALA LUMPUR – The incident that saw thousands of fish turn up dead along Sg Damansara near Shah Alam more than a month ago remains a mystery.
A month-long investigation by the Selangor Environment Department (DoE) has failed to identify the cause of the deaths.
Speaking to The Vibes, its director Nor Aziah Jaafar said test results of the water samples taken from 13 sewage plants within a 7km radius from the location where the fish carcasses were found failed to identify the cause.
“We received the report from the Chemistry Department last week. Results showed that all the sewage plants have complied with the Environmental Quality Act 1974.
“We do not have proof of what caused the fish deaths,” Aziah said.
She had previously said when contacted on June 25 that the incident is believed to have been caused by multiple sources.
Aziah said preliminary investigations revealed that the cause of deaths was due to the high volume of organic pollutants from sewage treatment plants along the river and nonpoint source pollution caused by rainfall.
When asked what the cause could possibly be, she said her initial suspicions were low dissolved oxygen levels, extreme heat, or swift water currents.
However, Aziah ruled out low dissolved oxygen levels as the cause of the incident when measurements conducted on the samples revealed that the dissolved oxygen content was more than 4mg per litre.
“If it’s less than 2mg per litre, the low dissolved oxygen content can affect fish.
“We could not perform forensic examination on the fish as well because when we got to the location, the fish had been dead for over 12 hours,” she explained.
Moving forward, Aziah said DoE will monitor the river and improve surveillance on factories in the area.
“We now consider this case closed,” she said.
On July 23, images of thousands of dead fish floating in Sg Damansara had gone viral on Twitter, shocking local residents and netizens.
Someone just polluted my river. Look at all the dead fish ☹️ what are the birds going to do. Where do I report this in Shah alam? pic.twitter.com/Ju4KOtwtUh
— visithra manikam ? (@visithra) June 23, 2021
Local resident Visithra Manikam, who tweeted several photographs, said she was told that the species of freshwater fish affected were the common pleco (ikan bandaraya) and tilapia. – The Vibes, August 3, 2021
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