Floods inundate thousands of houses in Central Java

Agus Maryono, The Jakarta Post, Purwokerto

At least 1,136 village homes and thousands of hectares of rice fields on the south coast of Central Java were submerged on Monday by massive floods following incessant rain over the past two days.

Cilacap was the regency hardest hit by the flooding with 467 houses inundated, followed by Brebes and Banyumas, where a total of 669 houses were swamped by the floodwaters.

In Kesugihan district, Cilacap, the heavy rain also caused a landslide which destroyed two houses, threatened six others and damaged crops.

Maos, another district in Cilacap, recorded 237 flooded houses, the largest number in the regency.

Wasi Ariyadi, head of Cilacap regency's social affairs office, estimated the losses inflicted by the disasters at hundreds of millions of rupiah, but no casualties were reported.

In Bumiayu, Brebes, the flooding covered hundreds of hectares of rice fields, swamped settlements on the outskirts of towns and destroyed crops.

Some farmers said they would have to replant their fields due to their crops being inundated, while others claimed they had just planted seeds when the floods came and washed them away.

Tambak district in Banyumas regency was also inundated as the embankments of the Ijo and Kecepak rivers collapsed, flooding 149 houses and 195 hectares of rice fields.

Tambak's Gebangsari village was the hardest hit in Banyumas, with 429 houses and 204 hectares of rice fields inundated by the floods, according to Tambak district chief executive Kuwat Tjondro Kalpiko.

The heavy rains at the beginning of this year's wet season also caused a landslide which blocked the main Purwokerto- Yogyakarta road at Pageralang, Kemrajen district, Banyumas.

On Friday, another landslide in Penusupan village, Sruweng district, Kebumen, claimed the lives of nine people who were buried alive.

Meanwhile, overt teak wood theft in Central Java has reached alarming proportions over the past four years.

Hertiarto, head of the provincial forestry office, disclosed in Semarang on Monday that between 1997 and 2000, around 5.2 million teak trees were felled and removed illegally, inflicting a total loss of over Rp 415 billion on the state.

As a result of the looting, 75,000 hectares of teak forests were destroyed.

The destroyed forests have added to the amount of critical land in the province, which in 1998 already covered 875,000 hectares.

The degradation of the soil has adversely affected water resources in catchment areas, and also given rise to aridity in the dry season and floods in the rainy season.

"The other negative impacts are the emergence of unproductive land, the disruption of environmental equilibrium, erosion, high sedimentation and natural disasters," he said.

Therefore, he added that his office would encourage efforts to replant the cleared forests by involving the people living around the forests to help repair the environmental damage.