The Story of A Capital of Flood

If I have to describe Jakarta, I can describe it in one word: Crash. Why? Because there are many literal traffic crashes happened every day in the city. Many of them involving the ubiquitous and wild motorcyclers and unruly public tranportation buses. Crash can also be taken from Crash programs; seemingly the only way the municipal government of Jakarta solve problems; they think only in 5 years span, the period in which they are in office. Crash can also be derived from crash of civilizations: urban, rich people living in high dwellings crashed ways each day with rural, wild people living on sidewalks or under the bridges (true, there are people living under the bridges, especially ramped up toll highway).

And Crash can also be derived from flood that comes crashing each year during the heavy rain season of november-april period.

Whenever there is a flood in a city, you'd be asking about the drainage system, the urban development planning, and the populations. Forget about them. The drainage systems in Jakarta range from 20 foot wide rivers, to 5 inches wide sewage, and all of them are choked by household and industrial wastes. Rivers come into Jakarta with brown water and exit to Jakarta beach blackened, rotten, and foul. Jakarta's drainage system is a continuing bad joke.

Urban development planning mainly consist of a private developers eyeing a piece of land, conspiring with the in office municipal goverment and their military cohorts, and bulldoze whatever in that piece of land and build high-rise apartments or shopping malls. Any others that are not eyed upon can grow whatever they like; even to become a dwelling area that have no sufficient drainage system or even organized addressing system. This unruly urban planning have caused Jakarta to lose many of its green, open areas where trees grow and earth exposed to receive and absorp falling rain. With concretes everywhere, water cannot go anywhere else but everywhere. Thus flood happens everywhere in the city: Riverside, Lakeside, and even at the city central roads and export-import routes.

Incomprehensive urban planning have also caused massive damages to the northen area of Jakarta. Where there were massive and wide mangrove forests to protect Jakarta from any saline water intrusions, above or below surface, now there were almost none. Again, concretes have been poured at them to make expensive beachside housings and apartments. This inconsiderate developments have been nullifying Jakarta's ability to thwart flood caused by elevated tide and heavy rain downpour.

Flood that happens on that area of Northern Jakarta have been able to cripple International shipping ports and Airports. Flood cover important roads that lead to Tanjung Priok international shipping port and Soekarno Hatta airport located on the northern part of Jakarta and was built by pouring concretes on mangroves. On January 2008, flood sunk Soekarno Hatta airport runways and made the airport totally useless. Combined with the fact that the access roads are also blocked, Soekarno-Hatta airport was turned into an isolated island for a day, causing thousands of passangers and people working there to go hungry, tired, restless, and almost savage.

Indeed, if not solved permanently as soon as possible, many causes for flood to happen that have been mentioned above will soon become widespread throughout the city, and soon you will read news that say Jakarta, capital city of Indonesia, is totally underwater.

And many cities and areas in Indonesia have been suffering from the same fate: flooded due to poor urban development planning. For many of them, there is one more cause for the flood: savage deforestations that are happening on the forest areas around the city. This savage deforestations have nullified the earth ability to sustain water and thus water flows on wildly everytime heavy rain occurs.