| Summary: | Sungai Pendang, Sungai Raja and Sungai Anak Bukit are tributaries of Sungai Kedah that are directly impacted by tidal flows especially when MADA operates its tidal gate near their headquarters at Sungai Kedah. The freshwater inflows into extensive freshwater/brackish wetlands downstream of the gate. Before Muda project, Sungai Kedah was a natural way of transportation for goods and people, and seawater intrusion is a normal activity until the tidal barrage was built on 1970. Operationally MADA kept the river water level high to back irrigate the paddy field for the farmers to cultivate paddy then later to enable recycling the water for irrigation purposes. The adverse effects of the new tidal gate accumulated and one of them was worsening the river water quality. This problem is aggravated with the nearby area fully develop from agriculture area to city centre and small industries area. Hence, effluent from these areas have made Sungai Kedah water quality to Class IV in 2013. MADA has been responsible in facing these problems and has successfully found a temporary but effective solution. By simply changing the standard operating procedure of the tidal gates, MADA was able to let new freshwater coming in and flushing out the dirty water that is full of effluents of agriculture, industrial and city’s activities naturally. This solution has improved the water quality from Class IV to Class III (2014) or even better Class II (2015). The way forward to sustain the Sungai Kedah’s water quality is crucial and making the river a livelier river. Maybe Sungai Kedah will be the next river after Sungai Melaka as a tourism attraction. MADA hope to extend this solution to cover longer period of time as it will benefit the Alor Setar residents and to adapt this technique to other rivers too in Malaysia. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2024.
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