Penang Development Corporation senior deputy general manager Yeoh Lean Huat said a new and larger canal running along the centuries-old Prangin Canal proved to be the saviour in the end.

At a press conference here, he said without the wider and deeper canal, 110ha of George Town could have had been submerged in floods, with the valuable World Heritage Site also badly ravaged.

This would effectively cover the Carnarvon, Chulia, Rope Walk, Cintra, Kimberley, Transfer, Phee Choon, Dickens and surrounding areas, he said.

“We could not break the old Prangin Canal. It was too precious.

“A parallel canal of sorts, through box culverts, was built next to it to channel away water from a large part of George Town into the sea,” Yeoh said.

He said, fortunately, this project was ready and operating from 2016, in time for the disastrous floods the following year which affected almost the whole island.

The old Prangin Canal was only 1.5 metres in depth and 4.5 metres wide. The new parallel canal’s size varied from 5.0 to 9.1 metres in width and 2.0 metres in depth, he said.

Yeoh said today, the old Prangin Canal, with koi fish, not only acts like a pond of sorts but becomes very useful during heavy rain.

He said the entire canal area serves as an “on-site detention” area, where excess rainwater is kept and slowly released into the sea through layers of tidal gates, staggered up to the shorefront.

Yeoh said there were no worries about the safety of the koi fish while the excess water is flushed out. There are adequate traps to save them from being flushed out to the sea.

The canal was a subject of hot debate after a picture of the Prangin Canal, with clear water filled with koi fish, was spread on social media.

The picture created a social buzz, with many wondering whether it was a river in Japan or Korea. Two Penang state agencies said it was actually the Prangin Canal that had undergone a facelift.

Authorities then clarified that the project was never a river but merely a canal that had been closed at one end.