Governor Anies says Jakartans not to blame for garbage collecting at Manggarai flood gate of Ciliwung River

The Manggarai flood gate in South Jakarta, which controls water flow in the capital’s portion of the Ciliwung River, has been inundated with so much garbage in the past couple of days but Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan says that’s not the capital residents’ doing.

Huge amounts of garbage, including plastic waste and long pieces of wood, are being excavated from the flood gate by the city’s Environment and Sanitation agencies after they collected there due to an increase in downstream water flow to Jakarta caused by recent heavy rainfall upstream in Bogor.

 

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Governor Anies says he’s sure that the garbage and the gate was not caused by Jakartans littering in the river.

“Environmental Agency workers are working all out to clean Manggarai. Jakarta has to collect an extraordinary amount of garbage. The garbage is not our citizens’. That’s garbage flowed downstream on the Ciliwung,” Anies told reporters today, as quoted by Detik.

While it’s difficult to know for certain where each piece of trash came from, Anies does have a point in that Jakarta’s Ciliwung has been largely clean since his predecessor Governor Basuki “BTP” Tjahaja Purnama managed to properly utilize sanitation workers to clean up the capital’s waterways.

On the rare occasion that there is large amounts of garbage on Jakarta’s Ciliwung (which are often collected at the Manggarai flood gate before they could flow further downstream in the capital), city officials tend to attribute the problem to heavy rainfall or floods on the Ciliwung further upstream, mostly in Bogor.

In this instance, the garbage most likely flowed downstream from Bogor, where the Ciliwung overflowed for the past couple of days. This video posted by Ciliwung Care Community volunteer Soeparno Jumar this morning shows a disturbing amount of plastic waste collecting  on the banks of the Ciliwung river in Bogor after water levels returned to normal.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BwtHvPzF-Y-/

Also read: Planet Plastic: The colossal challenge of cleaning up Indonesia’s Ciliwung River

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3iaKmRTuds