Been a terrible time for most of Jakarta’s poorest residents as decades of poor urban planning combined with heavy rains and the endemic evil of the local government to produce the worst floods in memory.
I recall the Feb 2002 floods here as being pretty amazing. Then as now our little kampung escaped the worst even though we’re just 100 m from the Kalibata canal whose waters are among the first over the banks. We remain “fortunate” that the opposite bank of the canal is several meters lower than our side so when the spill gates were finally opened 10 days ago the water poured over berms in streets below Landmark Place opposite rather than towards our home.
We drove though a tunnel there at about 4 a.m. on a Saturday on the way back from the Shangri-la hotel. By noon the following day the tunnel was completely submerged.
At the height of the flood last week there were 400,000 people out of home. Roughly 80 drowned or were electrocuted something I witnessed first hand in 2002 when a young man was fatally zapped in front of Sarniah department store just moments before I arrived.
It has taken five days for the levels to drop to the point where the majority of people can return to their stinking muddy homes and begin the painful period of clean-up. The total bill for the floods doubled to just shy of $800 million.
Classic responses from local power-brokers included the People’s Welfare Minister (a top industrialist who really feels the poor’s pain from behind the tinted windows of his 500 Series) Aburizal Bakrie telling the press that the floods were exaggerated and that everyone he saw on TV was laughing and playing in the (oily brown soup) rising waters. Not to be outdone, Jakarta’s governor locked himself in this office and refused to emerge for a week, at which time he denied all responsibility for failing to learn a damn thing from the experience five years ago.
The are any number of culprits and as much as you’d like to be able to point the finger at a specific single issue, the Jakarta floods are caused by issues environmental and manmade that defy the quick-fix.
To begin with, 14 rivers converge in Jakarta. The area’s reputation as a malarial tidal basin prone to floods, catastrophic epidemics and consequent die-offs were recorded even as the mallet-headed Dutch were busy constructing their VOC commercial base (ultimately renamed Batavia) into the swamps south of Sunda Kelapa port in the mid-17th century.
By building high to the water’s edge, clear-cutting vast stands of mangrove, paving the city’s natural catchment basins to build sparkly new shopping centres and doing virtually nothing to maintain and/or expand the city’s network of Dutch-era canals, the water has nowhere else to go.
Combine this with continuing clear-cutting of the Bogor hills south of the city – yes, Jakarta is in fact a mountain-ringed little jewel on the three days per year that the smog lifts sufficiently to see ‘em – to build luxury getaways for the elite, the vast qualities of raw garbage in the form of plastics that individuals and communities dump every day that foul the floodgates and merge to create vast woven rafts of debris, and you’ve got a recipe for (un)natural disasters.
Also fair to mention that few cities have the capacity to deal with seven consecutive 100 mm rain days without someone getting wet.
So we’ll see a few weeks of finger-pointing and moral outrage and then Indonesia will move on the next crisis. And the meantime the urban poor of Kampung Melayu and Bidara Cina will be cut loose to rebuild on their own. Until the next time.

The lazy days of the unemployed…
Let’s see what’s been accomplished in the two weeks since my return to Jakarta from the land of snow and ice (perhaps land of winter golf and 12C January days might be more appropriate moniker):
- a single blog, a single movie in the cinema and a dozen catch-up emails;
- head shaved & moustache and goatee shorn for first time in seven years (no one is gonna take Bongo the Moonfaced Boy seriously);
- first steps made towards sorting a new passport and visa, sleeping virtually every day till 1030 and watching far too much TV;
- several boozy nights including Friday and Saturday extravaganzas with visiting former workmates that seemed to get weirder and weirder as time passed;
- Rp 340,000 (US $40) worth of DVDs (about 50 discs) purchased along with a new Queens-sized Serta bed that cost roughly more than a lot of cars I’ve owned;
- new home office set up – and plans in the works for another capital outlay on a 20” iMac to supplement this beaten up PowerBook;
- one nasty day of flooding dealt with – foul waters throughout the living room, kitchen and bedroom – and nothing to complain about as the city copes with huge flooding that has displaced 320,000 people throughout the Greater Jakarta area with no sign that the situation is going to improve anytime soon;
- a dozen magazines and at least four books consumed including latest installments of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series about the exploits of a British soldier in the Napoleonic wars, and a parallel novel – part of the series that was represented in Master & Commander – about the exploits of a British naval officer during the same period. Both definitely ‘boy books’ but hugely entertaining. Ate Cormac McCarthy’s latest apocalyptic vision, The Road, in three sittings, including a marathon last Thursday that kept me up till nearly 4 a.m. And there’s more waiting in the wings including: Harp of Burma by Michio Takeyama, The Face of Another by Kobo Abe, Jose Saramago’s Journey to Portugal comes highly recommended; picked up Annie Proulx’s Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 for $6.99 at Chapters in Vancouver, and on principal I’ve gotta re-read Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Soccer War following his unfortunate death last week at the age of 74.
So the bottom line is that there is much lazing yet to do so I’d best not waste time on quasi-useful things like writing blogs.