Daily Express Subscriber
Sign in to your account.

AN electrical contractor with City Hall has been instructed to remove any unwanted wires related to the lighting for the jogging track at the Tun Fuad Stephens Botanical Park in the Bukit Padang area.

Telekom Malaysia (TM) Bhd, meanwhile, has called on its staff in Kunak to be more mindful of any overgrown branches which have encroached into the path of the company’s cables to prevent these foreign objects from damaging these installations.

This action follows feedback from a Park-user and TM subscriber about the irregularities involving the service lines along the track and at Kg Simpang Empat in the town.

The former spoke out about the electrocution hazards posed by the exposed wires he had spotted in the common areas along parts of the track, while the latter was concerned about the potential telecommunications outage which TM customers were likely to experience after a tree fell on some of the company’s cables in the village recently.

Both individuals provided Hotline with the pertinent details, regarding their grievances, which were respectively forwarded to agency and the firm.

A spokeswoman for City Hall’s Botanical Department said an inspection was made of the 2kilometre-track on the same day that it learned about the jogger’s concerns. 

“Our staff were accompanied by their peers from the Engineering Department (ED) on this occasion,” she said. “They spied short spans of wire lying among the pebbles and shrubs in certain places along the track. These bits of wire belonged to the previous lights in this part of the Park.”

She said the old lighting system had been dismantled so that a new one could be put in their place.

“The contractor tasked with taking down the lights that used to line the track had apparently neglected to clear the unwanted wiring and other debris from the work.”

The spokeswoman said the ED had chided the individual for this oversight and told him to correct these shortcomings as soon as possible.

“The contractor’s workers began taking away the discarded wires and other material that same afternoon.”

An ED spokesman said it would be monitoring the progress of this clean-up to ensure that any remnants from the previous lighting system were properly removed.

“Action was taken to upgrade the lights along the track before the Park was reopened in October,” he said.

He allayed any fears about the electrocution risk, saying that there was no electricity running through the exposed wires which the jogger had seen.

Where Kg Simpang Empat was concerned, a TM spokeswoman said four of its technicians had attended to the leaning poles and fallen overhead lines beside a restaurant in the village.

“We received word from the media that our assets were no longer upright as a huge rain tree had toppled onto them,” she said. 

“Personnel from the Fire and Rescue Services Department had apparently already dealt with the tree, chopping the trunk and branches into more manageable pieces.” 

She said its personnel went to the area four days after this came to the company’s attention.

“Thankfully, the cables had not been damaged but the poles were bending over at awkward angles. Our staff set these installations back upright and had stay wires installed to better keep them in place, before leaving the site.”

When asked about the hold-up in attending to the affected fixtures, the spokeswoman said this work could not be carried out any sooner as other more pressing matters had cropped up.

“We were caught up responding to a spate of cable-cuts which had been occurring at various locations around the town. Our technicians would replace the damaged cable at one place only to find, by the next day, that another section had been tampered with somewhere else.”

She said TM was an uphill task dealing with these acts of vandalism.

The spokeswoman said there was no fixed maintenance schedule for its installations in the district.

“Our assets, including the poles and overhead lines, are attended to as and when it becomes necessary to do so.”

In light of what had transpired in Kg Simpang Empat, she said the company’s personnel had since been instructed to be more diligent about keeping an eye on the condition of these structures around Kunak.