Ref: Siapa bilang NKRI kekurangan air? Bagaimana bisa diurus yang di
luar nan jauh dari Jakarta, kalau di pusat kekuasaan ini saja tak mampu
diatasi problem abadinya?
http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4456&Itemid=202
Battling Floods in Jakarta
Written by Our Correspondent
Thursday, 26 April 2012
Up to our necks
It's a losing battle, mostly
Once again, it’s that time of year when areas of Jakarta find
themselves hip-deep in water, the victims not so much of the seasonal
downpours but of poor sanitation, lagging infrastructure and substandard
drainage.
It is estimated that the health of as many as 5 million of Jakarta’s
official 10. 1 million residents are being threatened by river water that
is polluted by household and industrial waste. As many as 50,000 people
die annually in Indonesia, attributed to poor sanitation and hygiene,
according to a March, 2008 study by the World Bank, which estimates that
as much as 6 million tonnes of human waste are released into Indonesia’s
inland water bodies without treatment.
Unfortunately, Jakarta is far from alone. As cities have grown to
unmanageable size in third-world countries, the problem is being
compounded by climate change, which climatologists believe has increased
the number of adverse weather events. Another World Bank study published
in March and titled “Cities and Flooding” pointed out that over the past
18 months alone, destructive floods have hit Pakistan, Australia, South
Africa, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Brazil, Bangkok, the Mississippi River
in the United States and other areas. In 2010 alone, according to the
report, 178 million people were affected by floods.
As Jakarta has grown, it has become a textbook example of what
happens when urbanization meets flood risk. The city’s population has
continued to rise inexorably as millions of its 237 million people seek
economic advancement by moving to the city. In that, it is at one with the
rest of the world. In 2008, for the first time in human history, half of
the world’s population lived in urban areas, with two-thirds of this in
low-income and middle-income nationsThe world’s urban population is
estimated to rise to 60 percent in 2030 and 70 percent in 2050 to a total
of 6.2 billion, or double the projected rural population for that time,
according to the World Bank study.
Jakarta catches floods as badly as anywhere, unless it’s Manila,
where typhoons in the past two years have dumped massive amounts of water
on low-lying areas and paralyzed the city’s administrative services, so
that flood damage went unremedied for weeks, or Bangkok, where residents
regularly have to wade home.
Like most other coastal cities, Jakarta was built on a flood plain
because when the city was founded, water was the main method of transport.
The city is criss-crossed by 13 rivers, which are silting up without
dredging, which began in 2011 on three of the rivers. Some 40 percent of
the city now lies below sea level, and continues to sink as subsidence
continues as groundwater is sucked out for urban use. Concrete has
replaced green space, so that the ability of rainwater to penetrate into
the soil is lost.
But dredging the rivers is only part of the problem. In a country
best by vast numbers of provincial administrations and interlocking
jurisdictions not only in Jakarta but throughout the country, mitigation
has to start near the rivers’ headwaters, not in the low-lying areas where
the floodwaters are more difficult to control.
Hendri Bastaman, the Deputy Minister of the Indonesian Environment
Ministry, told IRIN, the reporting service of the United Nations Office
for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, that pollution in West Java’s
rivers is worsening, particularly in the Ciliwung and Citaruma areas.
“Much of the waste is dumped into rivers from households,” said
Bastaman. “People are using these rivers as personal toilets. We’ve also
found mercury in river water, which we suspect is coming from companies or
those running small-scale mining activities close to the rivers.”
Muhammad Rez Sahib, advocacy coordinator of KRuHA, a Jakarta-based
coalition of more than 30 Indonesian NGOs focusing on safe water access,
also told IRIN that none of the capital’s rivers could be viewed as safe
for human use.
“Even the water suppliers in Jakarta don’t use the water here
because it is so polluted,” he was quoted as saying. “Instead, they use
water from the Citarum River, which is also heavily polluted. Even after
this water is treated it’s still unsafe to drink.” The Citarum flows north
from Bandung, the capital of West Java, for approximately 300km to the
Java Sea.
Safe water alternatives for poor communities are “few and far
between” Sahib said. “Many will turn to use ground water, but due to a
poor sewage system and open defecation, 90 percent of ground water in
Jakarta is contaminated by E.coli bacteria. Many infant deaths are caused
by this bacteria - E.coli is the main threat to human life from these
rivers.”
Edward Carwardine, spokesperson for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
in Indonesia, told IRIN that in West Java the use of “improved water” -
obtained from taps, boreholes, covered wells and springs - falls below the
national average, with only half of the population (approximately 20
million) able to access it.
“When families don’t have access to improved water sources, disease
is much more likely,” said Carwardine. “Nearly a quarter of all deaths
amongst children under five in Indonesia are caused by diarrhoeal
disease.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that nationwide more
than 20,000 children in this age group die every year from diarrhoea.
Dengue fever and malaria, both spread by mosquitoes that thrive in
stagnant water, account for an additional 3 percent of overall child
deaths, according to Carwardine, who said more focus is needed to end the
widespread practice of defecating in the open.
The Environment Ministry’s Bastaman said the government is using
educational campaigns to raise awareness of the dangers of unsafe water
and to end defecation in rivers.
“For the Ciliwung we have a 10-year plan to restore the river’s
health,” said Bastaman. “But for the Citarum, it’s impossible to get it
back to the way it was prior to being polluted. The pollution is just too
much.”
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