Spores hottest day & hottest estate

HOT off the press: The by-election for Bukit Batok was called yesterday (April 20), with Nomination Day set for next Wednesday and Polling Day on May 7. After Mr David Ong from the People’s Action Party (PAP) resigned his post last month, the fight for the hot seat looks to be between the incumbent party’s Murali Pillai and Dr Chee Soon Juan from the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP).

Not since its recurrent problems with rats has the estate been more in the spotlight – here’s our lay of the land, as well as Bertha’s thoughts on some interesting points about this by-election.

Speaking of points, we have a bunch of graphs that may help you to understand the redundancy report released by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) yesterday. White-collar workers were burnt pretty bad: They lost the most jobs and took the longest to find new ones after they were retrenched last year, the report said.

Still, jobs went up in smoke across all broad sectors with manufacturing taking the top spot for being the most vulnerable, ahead of the service and construction sectors.

Workers in these sectors looking for new jobs better find some shade in the day – the weather has been incredibly hot and temperatures soared to 36 degrees on Tuesday, marking the day as the hottest day on record with an average temperature 30.6 degrees. Last week, it had soared to a 10-year high of 36.7 degrees.

It felt like a furnace – but this was literally so at an oil tank on Jurong Island yesterday, where 150 firefighters took five hours to put out a blaze that raged from about 3pm. The fire was so intense, it caused the oil tank belonging to the Jurong Aromatics Corporation (JAC) in Tembusu Road to buckle. No deaths were reported and JAC has yet to comment on the fire.

 

Featured image by Kong Chong Yew. 

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