This is indeed one of those occasions when one can rightly exclaim “Only in Jakarta!” and follow it with something extraordinarily silly like “…will you find a canoe clogging up the city’s drainage and causing floods.”
But first of all, to set the record straight, what is pictured up there is technically a kayak, not a canoe. But, since officials and the media are all incorrectly calling it a canoe, we’re just going to paddle along with it for the convenience of writing this story.
Anyway, on April 17, heavy rain poured down on Jakarta and caused a small flood on Jalan Gatot Subroto between the Jakarta Convention Center and the DPR building. The Jakarta Water Management Agency then sent its people to check out drainage pipes in the area, only to be surprised by the weirdest drainage discovery in recent times.
“Our workers checked the Jalan Gatot Subroto drainage that crosses the Inner City toll road. [They] found a small raft lodged inside a pipe that was 150 cm in diameter,” said Water Management Agency Head Teguh Hendrawan, as quoted by Kompas.
That canoe, along with several sandbags found in the same pipe, were thought to be the cause of flooding in the area at the time. Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama even told Central Jakarta Mayor Manggara Pardede to report the finding to the police, in case someone out there is deliberately sabotaging our sewers to create floods.
We still don’t know who put the canoe there. Could it be that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been using it to cowabunga in our sewers? Or maybe someone wanted to emulate this sewer paddling video (though why anyone would want to come into contact with Jakarta’s sewer water is beyond us):
