‘Nothing could prepare me for what I saw’

The Star:

‘Nothing could prepare me for what I saw’




Harrowing experience: Azhar being carried in an excavator bucket across a mudstream at the site.


HULU SELANGOR: It broke his heart when he saw the two tattered and muddied schoolbags, with damaged books inside, at the site of the Batang Kali landslide.

“Pilu (sad),” said The Star photographer Azhar Mahfof.


His thoughts went to the children who had to go through such a harrowing time. No one could tell if the bags belonged to kids who survived or died.Azhar, 44, was among a limited number of media personnel allowed to shadow search and rescue (SAR) personnel as they continued their lookout for the remaining victims on Sunday.

Besides spotting the bags of the youngsters, Azhar said it was also troubling to see wreckage of cars that were dragged along by the landslide.

The one hour allotted to him to capture the tragedy gave him renewed respect for the SAR team.

“I was out of breath after an hour of walking through the mud. I can only imagine how exhausted the SAR personnel must be,” he said.

He said he entered the site wearing sports shoes instead of boots, which would have made it a bit easier to trudge through the mud.

“I was not expecting to be selected, so I just came in sports shoes.

“The terrain was tough. There were times when I had to wade through almost knee-deep mud and silt to get to the area,” he said.

There was even a point where he and several other media personnel had to get into an excavator bucket to be carried over a stream of silt flowing with a strong current.

By the time his assignment ended, Azhar said he was sweating buckets and dirty with mud up to his thighs.

Although he had seen images of the area after the landslide struck on Friday, Azhar said he was taken aback to see it with his own eyes.

This despite him having covered a number of disasters throughout his 20-year career as a photographer.

For instance, he covered the Hulu Langat landslide in 2011 which took 16 lives.

In March this year, he was at the scene in Taman Bukit Permai 2 in Ampang, Kuala Lumpur, to capture the landslide that had happened there.

“But nothing could prepare me for what I saw at Father’s Organic Farm,” he said, adding that the scale of this landslide was horrifying.