PUTRAJAYA, February 27— Putrajaya is mulling to set up a new agency to manage flood disasters as the job cannot be managed solely by the National Security Council (NSC), Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said today.

The deputy prime minister said the idea is being seriously considered as part of improvements to the government’s current standard operating procedures (SOPs) for flood management, a disaster which affects the states along the east coast every year.

“We will be discussing the SOPs which we have been employing all these while and the improvements which needs to be done in handling disasters in the future, the flood especially and this requires us to do an extensive research as to the status of the NSC,” Muhyiddin said after chairing a post-flood committee meeting here.

Muhyiddin said that however the proposal will only be considered after studying models used by several other countries often affected by natural disasters such as the Philippines, Japan, Korea and the United States (US) and with the help of the United Nations Disaster Management Team (UNDMT).

“We will have to look at models that have existed in other countries first before deciding on whether to set up a dedicated agency or department,” Muhyiddin said adding that NSC cannot just continue to manage disasters alone.

“Obviously, NSC under its present scope cannot continue to just manage disasters. It has been managing (disasters) for many, many years, so we will look into that (setting up of new agency).”

Muhyiddin who is NSC chairman said that the move was to enable changes for better disaster management in the future.

“We want to look forward. The present set up has served its purpose for many, many years but in the future, in terms of dealing with major disasters and of course natural disasters especially we might have to make a lot of changes,” he added.