Pedu Lake

Pedu Lake is a tourist resort in the northern part of Peninsula Malaysia. There have been complaints in the papers from people who have been there citing the lake as dry or if you have been there and were disappointed with a dry lake, the letter below in the New Straits Times will shed some light to the situation.

02 Feb 2007
S.J. Alor Star

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I REFER to the report "The life drains out of Pedu Lake" (NST, Jan 31).

The failure of the resorts at Pedu Lake has little or nothing to do with the discovery of old graves, lack of promotion or remoteness as claimed.

These resorts were doomed to failure from the start owing to refusal on the part of the developers to take into account the operating conditions for the Pedu reservoir.

These conditions had been clearly made known by Mada, the operating agency of the Pedu dam.

The dam, along with the lake it created, is the primary source of dry-season irrigation for about 100,000ha of padi fields in the Muda irrigation area of Kedah and Perlis.

As such, the water level is subject to substantial annual drawdown when water is released, thus exposing more and more of the lake shore as the water level declines.

What then unfolds is truly an eyesore, especially for tourists who would have expected a lakeside environment but found instead a collection of chalets perched on a hilltop far from the water.

This annual occurrence has nothing to do with drought, being part of the weather cycle of north Kedah although a dry year would see a greater fall than normal in the water level.

Life has certainly drained out of these ill-fated resorts, but not Pedu Lake. Its annual release of water for irrigation enables a second crop of padi for 60,000 farmers in Kedah and Perlis, and contributes significantly to their lives and the country’s rice production.

Article source: The NST