It’s sort of hard to remember now after all of the praise given to Indonesia as the host of the highly-successful Asian Games, but in the run up to the massive regional sporting event that took place from late August to early September, there were a lot of concerns about the Jakarta government’s preparations for the competition. One issue in particular that created a stink was Governor Anies Baswedan’s solution to a smelly polluted river that sat right next to the main athlete’s dormitory for the event: a giant black nylon curtain to cover it all up.
At the time, many criticized the governor for choosing to cover up the odorous issue instead of getting it cleaned up ahead of time. Yesterday, the curtain was finally taken down and Anies admitted that a more permanent solution to the stink caused by pollution in the Sentiong River (which is usually referred to as Kali Item or “the black river”) was needed.
“The pollution problem cannot be solved with curtains, before it was used to resolve (the odor problem) but it was not to solve the problem of water pollution,” Anies said yesterday as quoted by Okezone.
Anies said that the government wanted to not just reduce the river’s foul smell but make the water clean again. He did not go into detail about any official plans to make that happen, but said that reducing the amount of pollutants going into the river was important and called on those who lived or had businesses near the river to stop using it as a dumping ground.
Anies noted that there were several business that made tofu and tempe that dumped their particularly foul waste into Kali Item. He also mentioned that a mattress was found tossed into the river recently.
When public criticism over the curtain got especially heated shortly prior to the games, Anies complained that the problem had been inherited due to neglect from the previous administration (even though photos showed that parts of the river had been much cleaner during the tenure of former Jakarta Governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama).
Despite the mounting criticism, Anies doubled down on his curtain solution and even said he’d consider expanding it to other rivers if it was successful. But that didn’t convince the people upstairs and concerns over the stinky river rose to the point that the central government’s Public Works and Public Housing Ministry (PUPR) temporarily took charge of the river to try and eliminate the smell before the start of the Asian Games (the lack of complaints from athletes seems to indicate they were successful).
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