Despite a stabilization over the last five days in Jakarta, the city still fears to be again a victim of massive flooding over the next few days. Giant flooding of the last weeks will probably help setting a more effective flood prevention plan.
JAKARTA- Recent widespread flooding in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta highlights the need for a far more effective flood management. Talking to the daily “Jakarta Globe”, Marco Kusumawijaya, an urban planning expert at the Jakarta-based Rujak Center for Urban Studies explained that building only floodways to make water flows bypassing Jakarta will remain inefficient. According to the expert, it does not address fundamental problems like environmental degradation.
“Infrastructure drains, but if you don’t reduce the amount of water [in] surface run-off, the capacity of the drains will always be overwhelmed,” said Marco Kusumawijaya. “Because when you build drains you only solve the effects of water, but not the cause of the flooding… You have to reforest the upstream area in the south and create open space in the downstream area to absorb more water,” he added.
Kusumawijaya said, historically, every time a new floodway has been built, flooding occurred in the following years. “When you build more infrastructure, you build more buildings because you think it’s OK because there are new drains,” he said.
Days of flooding in Jakarta peaked on January 17, bringing the megacity of more than 10 million people to a near standstill and killing 20 people. More than 40,000 people were displaced, according to the National Disaster Management Agency. More than 100,000 people’s homes were under water. The national weather service has predicted continued rains until early February.
Heavy flooding in 2007 killed 57 people and displaced more than 420,000 in Jakarta. The authorities put the total damage that year at nearly $695 million.
Jakarta is surrounded by mountains the slopes of which form the upstream catchment areas of 13 major rivers that flow through the city to the Java Sea. An estimated 40 percent of the city lies below sea level – made worse by land subsidence resulting from groundwater extraction, say experts.
Mohammad Hasan, director-general of water resources at the Public Works Ministry, said the completion in 2011 of a new spillway in East Jakarta reduced flooding in some parts of the city, but that it will still take years before flooding can be more effectively controlled city-wide. “In Jakarta there were about 78 flood-prone pockets, but they have been reduced thanks to the repairs of the West Flood Canal and the construction of the East Flood Canal. We will start work on normalizing several rivers and repairing sluices and dikes,” he said.
“The government’s flood management also includes campaigning on proper waste disposal and the use of infiltration wells to drain rainwater into the ground as well as increasing the role of communities”, he explained on television.
Work on a $189 million World Bank-funded project to dredge and rehabilitate floodways, canals and retention basins is expected to start in March, its team leader, Fook Chuan Eng, told the Jakarta Globe.
The first two years’ work involves dredging 67.5km of key channel systems and four retention basins, as well as repairing 42km of embankments, the report said.
Eng said around 57 residential areas in Jakarta – inhabited by 1.8 million people living near project sites – will experience less flooding after the project’s completion.
(Source: The Jakarta Globe)
Luc Citrinot a French national is a freelance journalist and consultant in tourism and air transport with over 20 years experience. Based in Paris and Bangkok, he works for various travel and air transport trade publications in Europe and Asia.
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