Indonesia: Dry Season Parches Lombok

Fitri Jakarta Post 10 Sep 12;

West Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara. “Quick! The water’s coming!”

The cry echoes through the dusty village of Batu Layar, in the West Lombok subdistrict of the same name, as a tanker truck rolls down the main street.

The village, languishing in the oppressive heat of the dry season, suddenly springs to life. Residents rush out of their homes carrying buckets, jerricans and other water receptacles.

They jostle around the tanker to get their fill, while village officials try to restore some semblance of order by ensuring that the women get their share first.

For those like Inaq Nurhasanan, the arrival of the water tanker, courtesy of the district’s social services agency, is a welcome relief in more ways than one.

“We need the water for every aspect of our lives, which makes the drought this year particularly hard for us,” she says.

The driest of seasons

Batu Layar’s 150 families have for the past four months been grappling with the most intense drought there in living memory.

Twice a day, the village’s men, women and children trudge three to five kilometers to neighboring villages to get water, often returning empty-handed as wells across the area dry up.

Last year’s rainy season ended a month early, in March; by May, the wells had bottomed out and the riverbeds had run dry. Now, 750 hectares of rice crops have failed, and there is no sign of the dry season ending. Official predictions are that the rainy season will not return until late October.

In the early days of the water crisis, the district disaster mitigation agency, or BPBD, set up large tanks in each village to hold water reserves, but these have been dry for weeks now.

The severity of the drought has forced local officials to send out tanker trucks to affected areas, but Batu Layar’s remote location and lack of properly paved roads means deliveries are few and far between.

“We’ve been waiting for a long time for the truck to come,” Nurhasanan says.

“This is only the third time it’s come here in the past four months.”

When it does come, the relief it brings is short-lived. Each household is restricted to just 20 liters of water. If they run out before the tanker returns, they go back to walking long distances in search of the precious commodity.

When they do find a functioning well, the villagers often must pay exorbitant prices for the water, leaving them struggling to afford basic foodstuffs.

Struggling to cope

Muhamad Taufik, the Batu Layar village chief, says there is little he can do about the situation, short of directing villagers to the nearest functioning well or pleading with the social services agency to send its tanker trucks more frequently.

Bachruddin, head of the civil registry at the provincial social services agency, acknowledges the severity of the drought this year and points out that Batu Layar is not an isolated case: Ten other villages in West Lombok are also in the grip of crippling water shortages, along with 11 villages in East, North and Central Lombok.

He says the agency is scrambling to address the crisis, but only has three tanker trucks to serve the entire island. Each district-level social services agency, meanwhile, only has one truck, except hard-hit West Lombok, which has none.

Budget constraints are also a factor. Bachruddin says his agency can only allocate Rp 50,000 ($5.22) per delivery — a sum dwarfed by the cost of the fuel alone for the long trips to more isolated villages.

Jajaki, head of the agency’s disaster mitigation unit, points out that the water shortage, though particularly acute this year, is an annual problem here.

To deal with it over the long term, the agency is encouraging villages like Batu Layar to plant more trees to restore their depleted water catchment areas and thereby raise the water level.

“We’ve already handed out thousands of seedlings to villages,” he says.

“We hope the campaign will be successful, or at the very least that the people will become aware that protecting the local vegetation is crucial to preserving their water sources.”

Mastur, a Batu Layar villager who has given up hope of an early rainfall this year, agrees that reforesting the area is the only way to ensure that there are no more dry spells like this in the future.

“Over the years we’ve destroyed the trees that ensured our water sources. Now we’re having to make amends by planting new ones,” he says.