Andrio Adiwibowo, Jakarta
The sky over Jakarta was bright and everything seemed peaceful on Wednesday. However, if you turned on the television and watched the news, you would have been surprised to see the reality.
The capital city, the center of power and government in Indonesia, has been struck by floods and paralyzed for almost a week, leaving hundreds of thousands of people displaced and buildings damaged. The flooding covered 70 percent of Jakarta at one point. At least 314,000 Jakartans were directly affected and millions more indirectly due to electricity outages, disrupted telecommunication networks and water and gasoline supplies, and traffic congestion.
Jakarta is not blessed with great geographical conditions. It is located in the lowlands, near the sea, and is crossed by 13 rivers flowing down from the south. Yearly rainfall is more than 2,000 millimeters and there is rarely a year without floods. Another time bomb is the rapid population growth and urbanization.
These factors have combined to cause such urban cancers as massive land conversion, which continues to occur at full speed. The Jakarta floods are a microcosm of a much greater national problem. Regulations are ignored at will by the kings of the construction industry, real estate players and industrial bullies who run factories that ignore the surrounding environment.
A century ago, the Dutch colonial government reminded city planners that the development of Batavia, as Jakarta was then known, should focus carefully on the waterways. The Dutch, with their long experience in controlling water and drainage systems, made sure that Batavia had a comprehensive and engineered network of rivers, drains and canals to cope with the weaknesses of man and acts of God.
Nevertheless, the Dutch canal system never quite managed to cope with the drainage problems. For instance, in 1846, almost a century before Indonesia's independence, they chose the same approach as the current administration: to sort out the problems only when floods happened.
After the major floods in 2002, the Jakarta government declared a drive to prevent future flooding, but the campaign quickly faded away. At about the same time government officials proposed the creation of a megacity that would cover all of Greater Jakarta. The core of the concept was that the development of Jakarta, including its flood control system, should be coordinated with the four satellite regions of Tangerang, Bekasi, Bogor and Depok.
But the economic interests of the respective administrations thwarted the plan. The plan recommended that the satellite regions, mainly Bogor, put a brake on development and land conversion. Bogor considered the idea discriminatory and pledged to continue its development programs. The other satellite regions danced to Bogor's tune.
Sometimes, coordination has its price. The solution offered here is that Jakarta has to provide a lavish budget to buy land in Bogor that can serve as water catchment areas. Another strategy is to provide incentives for landlords or stakeholders to help in land preservation.
Managing the environment at a moderate level may be more promising. Instead of doing some acrobatic land-based preservation, one should emphasize the management of the Ciliwung River, which runs across Jakarta and Bogor. However, there are still dangers. The Bogor authorities will view everything that is dumped into the water yet has passed through its territory as not being its problem or responsibility.
Managing flooding is not just about how to keep people from water, but how to get people out of water to safety. Experiences from past disasters provide us a big picture of how poor the government's post-disaster management is. Some problems always on the menu are the poor availability of instant food, dry clothes, clean water and medicines for particular diseases. The authorities are now facing demanding challenge to accelerate the delivery of aid.
The next principle issue is policy. Most policies on environmental management are immature and being planned and applied only for the short term. On the other hand, environmental processes and problem are long term. We have assumed that within five years major flood would strike, unfortunately, the plan was only effective for one year.
The laissez-faire attitude toward the environment by human enterprises has caused one disaster after another. The immense destruction of rain forests takes place far away from Jakarta, but the message is the same: taking firm action only when the river of grievances overflows. One should notice how much the irresponsible behavior of Indonesians affects the severity of the "natural" disaster now under way in Jakarta
Right now the water has begun to dry up, as is our memory of yesterday's floods. Thus, we will forget and fail to learn. We assume nothing has happened, as if it's business as usual. If we continue to dance to the same tune, then what happened yesterday will recur, perhaps on an even larger scale. Apparently, the people of Jakarta had better learn to swim.
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