Jakarta has long suffered floods during the rainy season that cause massive amounts of property damage and paralyze large swathes of the capital. However, the last deluge that debilitated most of the city took place in 2015 and the years since have mainly seen flooding limited to a few perennially high-risk areas.
But one official is sounding the alarm now to warn that this upcoming rainy season, which is expected to reach its height in February 2019, could once again see large sections of Jakarta inundated with flood waters.
Bambang Hidayah, the head of the Ciliwung Cisadane River Region Central Office (BBWSCC), said that 129 villages in Jakarta were under threat of flooding in the upcoming rainy season, out of a total of 268 villages located with the capital.
“Based on the hazard-prone maps of the Jakarta Regional Disaster Management Office (BPBD), there are 129 villages that are flood-prone that we are focusing on,” Bambang said yesterday as quoted by Kompas.
Bambang said the primary risk to the villages in question were overflowing rivers, including the Angke, Pesanggrahan, Krukut, Ciliwung and the West Flood Canal. The most vulnerable villages were located in in South Jakarta, followed by East Jakarta, West Jakarta, and North Jakarta.
The BBWSCC head said that the the potential for flooding around these rivers is still high because work on widening them and normalizing them with concrete has stalled since last year.
The primary delay for that, said Bambang, was the Jakarta Provincial Government’s reluctance to evict people living in illegally erected housing alongside the rivers, which has long been a contentious issue in Jakarta.
Former Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama received both praise and criticism for his unapologetic efforts to evict riverside slum settlements in order to accelerate river normalization efforts and prevent flooding. His successor, current governor Anies Baswedan, campaigned in part on promises that he would not evict people in the same way as Ahok. although his administration has also been protested by those few communities it has argued needed to be evicted for river projects.
But at the moment, none of the normalization projects planned during Ahok’s era are currently being worked on. Bambang said BBWSCC was attempting to minimize the danger by dredging the at-risk rivers, but admitted that it would not be as effective.
The head of Jakarta’s BPBD, Jupan Royter, said that while no normalization program were not currently being undertaken, the government was still managing flood risks by dredging and cleaning up the garbage in the most flood-prone rivers.
We’ll see in a few months how well-prepared Anies’ administration really is.
