KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 10 — The temporary water disruption in Selangor last week affected a lot of people, including a dialysis centre in Saujana Utama, Sungai Buloh.
A Facebook posting by user Bob Danial, or his real name Mohd Danial Sabudin, gave an indication of how rough the situation was as dialysis sessions at the Bahiyah Dialysis Centre had to be rescheduled due to the water disruption.
Danial, who has been going there for dialysis treatment since March this year, said that he and other patients were supposed to have a session at 7am on Friday.
He ended up having his session at 10pm and that was after the water tank was filled up by the Pasukan Bomba Sukarelawan Saujana Utama (PBSSU) after Air Selangor was unable to help the centre out until Saturday evening.
An initial fill by Air Selangor on Thursday evening was insufficient as water was used in large quantities to backwash the machines.
The dialysis centre would usually have three sessions per day: from 7am to 11am, 12pm to 4pm and the last one which is from 5pm to 9pm.
“What happened was, on Friday when we came in, the machines were unable to run because the tanks had dried up.”
“We waited until 8am and the centre nurses told us to go back first and they will reschedule our session,” Danial told Malay Mail.
Danial claimed that the centre called Air Selangor since Thursday evening but to no avail and what made it worse for them was that around 10am on Friday, it stopped taking calls from them.
Fortunately, later on Friday evening, they managed to contact Pasukan Bomba Sukarelawan Saujana Utama (PBSSU) to help them out.
By 10pm that evening, the firemen came and refilled their tanks and since the dialysis centre could be reopened, they called Danial and the rest of the 7am patients to come in for their sessions.
According to Danial, a dialysis session takes up to four hours but as the water disruption was still ongoing, the centre had to shorten the session to three hours.
Danial's session which started at 10pm Friday ended at 1am.
“It’s only about 75 per cent complete and we had to endure it for another two days since the centre is closed on Sunday,” Danial said, adding that he would usually go for his dialysis session alternating between days.
According to Danial, dialysis is the process of removing excessive fluids from patients who are suffering from kidney failure as they couldn’t dispose of it themselves and if they miss a session, they tend to become bloated and for some serious cases, this could affect their breathing.
“Besides that, some of these patients are old people and they are depending on others to send them to the dialysis centre, so that is another situation.”
“But all in all, we are really thankful to the PBSSU team who came and helped us,” Danial said.
Since the dialysis centre still had patients from their 12pm and 5pm sessions who weren’t able to go through with their dialysis on Friday, the centre had no other choice but to fully operate all 24 of their machines the next day.
PBSSU finished refilling the tanks at the dialysis centre at about 1am and they did another round of refilling on Saturday morning.
The Air Selangor water tanker came later that Saturday evening.
PBSSU station chief Azman Razak said that it received a call from a patient from the Bahiyah Dialysis Centre on Friday at around 10pm.
They dispatched three firemen including Azman himself to help with the refilling.
“It took us about three hours to finish refilling the water tanks.”
“This is because water is a critical need for the dialysis centre and whenever we’ve filled it up, it’ll get drained really fast and plus the water tank that they’re using is big,” Azman told Malay Mail.
He added that they got the water from a nearby fire hydrant located at a housing area, Elmina Green which is just a kilometre away from the dialysis centre.
It took the volunteer firemen four trips to complete the refilling of the water tank.
Prior to that, Azman said that he had received a WhatsApp message from Air Selangor prohibiting the use of fire hydrants for public use but they took the risk anyway.
“We just went on with it.”
“Because people's lives are involved in this and if we’re going to get scolded for that, so be it,” Azman said.
The water disruption lasted the weekend and the Bahiyah Dialysis Centre has resumed operations since Monday.
