Malaysia to make rain as Games face ruin
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Your support makes all the difference.MALAYSIA is preparing to send aircraft to seed clouds and "clean" the air over Kuala Lumpur to dispel concern that water shortages and smog will disrupt September's Commonwealth Games.
According to reports over the weekend, British marathon runners intend to boycott the games if the Malaysian capital continues to suffer from the smoky "haze", caused by vast forest fires in Borneo, which has afflicted it for much of the last year.
But senior organisers appear to be at odds over what they will do if the smoke fails to clear. Only a week ago, the sports minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, insisted the Games would be held in Kuala Lumpur "come rain or shine", and angrily denied rumours they might be moved to Australia. But yesterday he admitted some events might have to be moved out of Kuala Lumpur to other Malaysian cities, only to be contradicted moments later by the games' chief organiser.
"It is reasonable at the moment to look at contingency plans," said Mr Muhyiddin. "There will be a cost in moving events from Kuala Lumpur ... [but] we are as concerned as you that any environment should not be bad for the health."
But the head of the organising body, Hashim Mohamad Ali, denied this. "We're not talking about any change of venues," said Mr Hashim, who offered his resignation last year after allegations of financial profligacy among Malaysian sports officials.
"The event will take place at the actual venue we have assigned to that particular sport. Full stop."
Malaysians are hoping fervently that the haze, which has caused health problems and transportation accidents throughout South-east Asia, will have abated by September, but at the moment it is a daily feature of life in Kuala Lumpur. Schools and airports in different parts of Malaysia have been intermittently forced to close over the last two months.
Yesterday, the city's famous Petronas Twin Towers, the world's tallest buildings, were almost invisible just a few miles from the city centre, although the situation was much worse last September when a state of emergency was declared in the province of Sarawak.
The location of the fires in the jungles of Borneo in neighbouring Indonesia makes them extremely difficult to extinguish. The Asian economic crisis, of which Indonesia is the most serious casualty, has made the job of tackling the fires a low priority for the government in Jakarta.
Yesterday the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, announced a range of measures designed to counteract the smoke, including the technique of "cloud-seeding", whereby salt solution is dropped by aircraft directly on to clouds to release rain.
"We are also making artificial rain and we are sucking up the air in order to clean it," Dr Mahathir said.
"We are quite sure we can reduce the amount of haze to a level that makes it possible for athletes to run and walk."
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