Kafil Yamin, Jakarta Globe 12 Mar 09;
The mass flooding in greater Jakarta in February 2007 was, all puns aside, a watershed moment for the capital. With damage in the trillions of rupiah, hundreds of people killed, injured or sickened, and the floods of 2002 still a recent memory, the public had simply had enough.
“I almost spent the night in my car because I could not move at all — can you believe it? Why are all the roads inundated each time rain falls? What has the Jakarta administration done about this?” The words of Santoso, who lives in Jatibaru, Central Jakarta, sum up the frustrations of millions as he reminisces bitterly about the 2007 floods.
The human and economic losses from those floods two years ago warrant the angry comments. At least 52 people died, hundreds more suffered ailments ranging from diarrhea to dengue fever and a staggering 340,000 were displaced. In the wake of the disaster, economic losses were tallied at Rp 8.8 trillion ($739 million), from damage to and destruction of houses, vehicles, office buildings, factories and markets.
Toll road operators alone suffered a loss of Rp 2 billion after they were forced to open their gates for free during the disaster to allow vehicles trapped along inundated roads to pass. The toll roads turned out to be the only way out for thousands of jammed cars, recalled Frans S. Sunito, director of PT Jasa Marga, the city’s main toll road operator.
The World Health Organization said it was the worst flooding here in three centuries and the damage backs up that claim: At least 90,000 houses were partially submerged or washed away and the damage included 75 automotive and electronic factories, 561 textile factories, 2,100 furniture businesses, 40 traditional markets and 16,240 street vendor operations in five areas in Jakarta.
Has anything changed?
But the big question is this: Why was it allowed to happen?
In 2002, amid mass flooding in Jakarta that killed 25 and caused huge economic losses, an even worse calamity five years later was the last thing anyone imagined; after all, when the waters receded, hadn’t there been those heartfelt, insistent government pledges to fix the problem?
But what happened in 2007 showed they didn’t fix the problem; even today officials still haven’t implemented a proper system to prevent the city from flooding en masse.
The first five weeks of 2009 saw several areas of Jakarta inundated by floodwaters, leading to severe shortages of clean water.
Through Feb. 5, flooding forced at least 1,923 residents to leave their homes and live in refugee camps, according to public health official Tini Suryati, who works in Kampung Pulo, a camp for people fleeing the floods in South Jakarta.
“Many of them suffered from diarrhea, respiratory problems and skin irritations,” Tini said, adding that most of the affected were women and children.
The National Meteorology and Geophysics Agency, or BMG, says more floods are expected in the coming weeks — hardly a surprising forecast given Jakarta’s annual climatic susceptibility to heavy rains, such as the downpour on Monday.
“Heavy rain will continue until May 1,” said Endro Santoso, the agency’s head of climate and air quality, who was forced to brief village heads and district chiefs across greater Jakarta on Feb. 1.
As floodwaters were rising in January — in West Jakarta they reached 1.5 meters — national and city government officials gave contradictory explanations as to why, ranging from choked-up canals to clogged underground sewers.
Back in December 2003, the head of the Jakarta Office of Public Works at the time, Ida Gusti Ketut Gede Suena, uttered the remarkable claim that dredging of the city’s 13 rivers was 75 percent complete, which would go a long way in preventing future flooding. Suena also said his office had created new garbage dumping sites to prevent people from throwing their waste into the city’s rivers, and assigned special officers to clean up the rivers.
But one year later, the story was somewhat different: Jakarta Vice Governor Prijanto said his administration and the central government had only “agreed” to dredge the city’s 13 rivers.
Prijanto tried to explain away the failure to dredge the rivers for decades by saying it “needs a lot of money.” He explained: “The planned dredging of the 13 rivers will be funded by the World Bank, which will account for $150 million in loans and $10 million in grants.”
Promises, promises
More than four years later, the Jakarta administration still has not fulfilled the requirements needed to obtain the money. Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo has predicted that the World Bank would release the money this month or in April. But even if the cash arrives today, the dredging would still not be completed until 2012, Prijanto said.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned rivers, as anyone who passes their banks or over their bridges can attest, are still heavily clogged with garbage. Amid the current rainy season, the current head of public works in Jakarta, Budi Widiantoro, said his office had prepared an early warning system, flood control operations and flood monitoring to prevent repeats of the 2002 and 2007 disasters.
“Jakartans do not have to worry. This time, we are well-prepared,” he said.
Not surprisingly, their explanations contradict experts who point to the gradual disappearance of water catchment areas in greater Jakarta as the main reason for continual flooding, as more lands are covered with asphalt, revetment and concrete.
Luxurious resorts, shopping malls and housing complexes in the West Java provincial areas of Bogor, Tangerang, Depok and Bekasi now encircle the capital and provide no empty space for rain to soak into the ground.
The water then accumulates in lower areas like Cipinang, Kramat Jati, and Pasar Minggu and drowns many parts of the capital before it flows into the Java Sea via the heavily-clogged Ciliwung river, said Pitoyo Subandrio, head of the Ciliwung-Cisadane management office in the Public Works Ministry.
The natural lakes of Sunter and Kelapa Gading, and pools in Pantai Indah Kapuk along Jakarta’s northern coast, which used to absorb water and rainfall, have disappeared and been replaced by mansions and apartment towers, recreation areas and malls.
A recent study by the Limnology Research Center at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, or LIPI, showed that out of 218 lakes in Jakarta and its outskirts at the beginning of the 1990s, only a quarter of them remain today.
District administrations and their legislative councils are the most responsible for such changes, Pitoyo said, “because they issue the building licenses, and building license are based on spatial planning.”
The city’s spatial planning strategy has been altered in order to accommodate business expansion at the cost of green space, said Nanang Roffandi Ahmad, executive director of the Indonesian Forest Concessionaires Association.
It’s about money
Nanang said that in stark contrast to the Dutch colonial administration, Indonesian officials had adopted a “revenue-based” administrative strategy, which prioritized raising funds over managing environmental impact.
“This explains why construction continues in North Jakarta, which, based on [government] regulations, should remain as a green area,” Nanang said. “An administration would only be considered successful if it were able to generate revenue, and most revenue comes from property tax and investments.
“In revenue-based administrations, every vacant space should be utilized to generate revenue. Empty lands are regarded as unproductive,” he said.
Pam E. Minnigh, a Dutch expert on water issues and director of PILI Green Network, said the Dutch colonial administration designed Jakarta’s drainage and flood control master plan for 100 years. However, in the years following independence, he said, Indonesian officials reduced it to a much shorter period of time — less than 25 years.
It was aggravated by a lack of coordination and communication among the Jakarta administration, central government institutions and city mayors, and between the city’s public works office, PT Jasa Marga and the Directorate of Watery with the Ministry of Public Works.
The loss of vegetation in the upper catchments of the Ciliwung, Cisadane, Kali Sunter and Kali Angke waterways, coupled with the absence of an adequate flood control system such as dikes, water pumps and plungers, means piecemeal attempts to deal with the problem are likely to fail. Add to that mix continued illegal construction on environmentally high-value areas, especially lakes and swamps, and an overall solution is hard to find.
But an intriguing question remains: Why aren’t the available canals and dikes enough to prevent flooding?
Kosasih Wirahadi Kusumah, environmental manager of the controversial Pantai Indah Kapuk city complex near Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, pointed at the pumps in the canals.
“Actually the pumps are in good shape as they’ve only recently been purchased. But most of them are not functioning because they don’t have enough fuel,” he claimed, adding that local highway workers steal the fuel and sell it.
During field surveys to the flood-prone spots around the complex, which is known as PIK and has been blamed for exacerbating flooding on the airport toll road, he said he often found pumps did not have fuel in them.
“PT Jasa Marga always regularly supplies the pump operators with fuel, but the fuel is often unavailable when heavy rains come and canals overflow, which is when the pumps need to work.”
Can anything be done?
Some city officials, academics and environmentalists are taking an increasingly fatalistic view of the problem.
“It is impossible to make Jakarta totally free from floods,” Fauzi said. “All we can do is to minimize the effects and avoid destruction.”
Suranto, a mapping consultant at PT Alfa Tersia Konsultan, said, “There’s nothing much we can do, unless we can move half of the government service centers to other places” to reduce the population intensity in Jakarta.
Greater Jakarta’s most flood-prone areas include Cengkareng, Kali Deres and Kebon Jeruk in West Jakarta; Kemang, Pasar Minggu and Tebet in South Jakarta; Menteng and Sawah Besar in Central Jakarta; Kelapa Gading and Penjaringan in North Jakarta; and Kramat Jati in East Jakarta, according to the BMG.
Pitoyo said the most pivotal flood controller was the Ciliwung River, which in the old days served the people’s needs — transportation, fishing, washing and crop irrigation.
“The only time the river overflowed and caused flooding was after extremely heavy rains,” he said.
In the early 1920s, the Dutch colonial government built the West Canal to catch and channel overflowing water into the sea. The Dutch also built a vast tea plantation in the Puncak area of West Java, which was intended to produce tea, as well as catch rainfall and reduce the flow of water into the Ciliwung.
This old system sustained the Ciliwung for decades, but today Puncak is overcrowded with villas and large houses. Cibubur, which is next door to Puncak, hosts a vast housing and business complex, while the hilly Sentul area is filled with new buildings and rows of shops.
These lands can no longer absorb rainfall, which now flows straight into the Ciliwung.
“The river, which has become the catchment area of last resort, is no longer able to hold all the incoming water, so it overflows and causes floods,” Pitoyo said.
Garbage!
Adding insult to injury, growing local communities along the Ciliwung dump their waste into the river. Around 350,000 people live along the riverside, from Kampung Melayu to Manggarai, according to Pitoyo, and everyday they fling garbage into the river. Around 40 percent of the river’s sediment is from rubbish and household waste.
District administrations make flood mitigation more complicated because they don’t abide by spatial planning regulations. Housing complexes, shopping malls and factories now stand on former lakebeds.
Natural phenomenons also contribute to flooding, including the fact that the capital is sinking. Fauzi says Jakarta has sunk by around 40 centimeters in the past 18 years, while unofficial sources estimate it’s now sinking between 4 and 10 centimeters a year.
Making matters worse, the city-owned drinking water company, Perusahaan Daerah Air Minum, is unable to provide water for Jakarta’s big buildings, leaving them no other option than to extract their own from underground, causing the land around them to gradually sink.
Pitoyo said work continued to expand the West Canal to handle more floodwater.
“We are in the final stages of construction. It should be ready by the end of this year,” he said.
The West Canal stretches 17 kilometers from Manggarai in South Jakarta to Pantai Indah Kapuk in North Jakarta.
Plans to build the East Canal were first drafted in 1973 and there have been intermittent expansions during the years since due to budget constraints. A new planned phase cuts through the greater Jakarta rivers of Cipinang, Sunter, Buaran, Jatikramat, Cakung and Blencong. It will
also cross 11 villages in East Jakarta and two villages in North Jakarta.
When completed, the East Canal will be able to channel water from all six rivers, Pitoyo said.
Fauzi said he was confident that with the completion of the East Canal in 2012, Jakarta’s flooding problem will be reduced by 40 percent.
“And if we can be 100 percent consistent in implementing the flood prevention master plan, by 2018 flooding in Jakarta will have been reduced by 75 percent,” Fauzi told reporters in Jakarta on Feb. 12.
However, the Jakarta administration has acquired only 30 percent of the land for the East Canal, which presents another problem.
East Jakarta Mayor Koesnan Abdul Halim acknowledged that ongoing disputes between the government and local landowners on selling prices is hampering the project.
“I now have 90 land certificates on my desk whose owners are waiting for payment, but we don’t have the money,” Koesnan said.
