In Floods

So this time last week, four days of monsoon rains forced a 30m breech of the north wall of Jakarta’s West Flood Canal beneath the Rasuna Said bridge, flooding the heart of the city. You might have seen the pix on TV: the ‘iconic’ Hotel Indonesia traffic circle, home to luxury shopping centres, bank towers, and five-star hotels turned into a cappuccino-colored swimming pool.

An estimated 35,000 people were displaced (in 2007 the figure was roughly 400,000). At least a dozen people died including four employees trapped in the basement of the nightmare cubist 40-storey UOB building who either drowned, were electrocuted or died of exposure; elite Marine divers spent several days in swimming through the murk three stories below street level searching for air-pockets and possible survivors before surrendering to the inevitable.

Our den is about 250m from the canal breach point. We were lucky. The surge choose the path of least resistance, pouring along the broad length of Jl Purworejo and Sumenep – which are separated by a deep, 10m wide canal – before spilling on the main drag, Sudirman. Between 10am and 11am Thursday, our place which is on a narrow side-street parallel to Jl Purworejo, went from being dry, to being 40cm deep in brown silty grunge courtesy of the Ciliwung River that feeds the canal – one of 13 rivers that converge on Jakarta – and judged to be one of the most polluted on earth. Ultimately the water would rise to almost 50cm, or roughly knee-high on a six-footer like me. Everything got stacked and then stacked again; nothing to be done about the Christmas tree tho… it looked kinda forlorn there in the corner. Moved to the second floor etc. for the goggle-eyed twins and their playmate to pore over. Reminded me of Angela’s Ashes, and Frank McCourt recalling his father Malachy regularly moving the family from their flooded main floor to the second, dubbed Italy, because it was warm and dry.

The main Purworejo intersection was a chest-deep Class II rapid. Local yoots, personal drivers, cops and RT/RW guys - including contingents of tattooed mini-gangsters running the parking rackets on the nearby Jl Blora bar strip - set up belay lines that allowed the brave and foolhardy to cross the street.

The tropical fish and coral market one block north on Sumenep was hard hit; the waters receded to reveal fat koi rotting in the underbrush. Briefly we rescued one from the laneway and tucked him into a large pot. Not sure if it was the toxic canal waters that killed him or one of the pups dumping six-months-worth of fish food in his pot, but by morning it was an ex-koi.

Friday we bought a 2000 watt Krisbow (sort of a Canadian Tire-type of cheap tool and machine maker) gas generator at Ace Hardware for about $350.00 which gave us some power that night and filled the water tank (till the utility cut off that service to our neighborhood). Weird note, gas at the pump is heavily subsidized but when you fill a jerrycan it has to be unsubsidized; upshot is a 20L Jerrycan cost Rp190,000.00 ($21) which is what it costs to fill the car’s 45L tank. That evening the first of many rescue boats began removing the old and infirm.

By Saturday the bulk of the clean-up was done. We took the goblins for a swim and shower at the gym, and loaded eight five-gallon bottles with tap water which turned out to be unnecessary bc by 6 pm both power and water were back on and the genset was silent. We got off lightly compared to others. It’s an older lower-middle class area in transition and many of our neighbors live crammed together in narrow alleyways that run off our street and Jl Kudus where the water had nowhere else to go but up. Anyone in a single story home was kinda uckfayed. Same applied to our wealthy neighbors along Purworejo/Sumenep. Two hundred kg porcelain planters were picked up and thrown into the living room of the home of a famous Indonesian designer; walls collapsed and basements full of luxury automobiles – as many as five to a house - were destroyed. The lucky few managed to grab a posse and haul 'em out.

A Sunday tour of the neighborhood revealed the huge clean-up job still facing many people in our kampung, and an army of garbage pickers with their rolling boxes stacked with ruined bedding, clothing and smashed furniture, anything of value. Some of the waste channels (‘got’) that run along the side of the alleys have been cleaned out; others are still waiting from that nasty business. The fear now is dengue as the mosquito population rebounds and the possibility of sustained rains; the soil is saturated so water pools rapidly and a 48-hour burst of rain would likely collapse the berm again making the situation an order of magnitude worse for everyone in our area.

According to people who have lived there since the '40s, nothing remotely similar has ever happened in this kampung. The "why" part is a long complicated story that I will render down without getting into the sordid history of Jakarta canal and flood-gate management and/or maintenance. In 2002, flood waters topped the south side berm of the same canal at almost exactly the same point. The Landmark Towers, two of the city's earliest buildings have basically emptied in the decade+ since and the Regent (now 4 Seasons) Hotel was closed for 18 months of renovations. So, the Jakarta DKI (provincial) government spent some money to mount a wall on the south side of the canal, but being small-minded bobbins, failed to do the same thing on the north side, opting instead for rip-rap, sand and soil. Three/four years back they double-wided the Rasuna bridge, which weighted up the exact spot that failed last week, and then opened the area to expanded billboard advertising which resulted in seven massive steel pilings being driven into the same roughly 200-meter stretch of embankment. This was not an "Act of God", but the inevitable consequence of the reactionary stupidity that is the hallmark of decision-making in all levels of government in Indonesia. Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Jakarta_Flood