Learning from floods

Learning from floods

The beginning of this year has seen widespread flooding which has taken a number of lives and caused considerable material damage, swamping several areas in Indonesia. Successively, floods hit two regencies in Aceh, Jakarta, Central Java, North Sulawesi, the Kampar regency in the province of Riau and, during the past week, once again the city of Jakarta.

The floods which again swamped Jakarta seemed to bring even greater suffering to the capital city's populace than those which occurred earlier on Jan. 6 and 7. This time the flooding was widespread. It not only took a considerable toll in lives and property, it also paralyzed parts of the city, upset people's activities, disrupted road and air traffic and television broadcasts, and forced the postponement of students' final examinations at a number of schools.

Floods usually occur in river basins whose upstream forest cover has been denuded and whose soil is no longer able to absorb sufficient water. The forests of those areas have been cut down and transformed into forests of concrete. As the development of residential and business areas is undertaken in a random manner and without sufficient coordination, drainage canals become clogged in many places.

The big floods which have devastated Jakarta should serve as a lesson to us all, especially in the big cities, and teach us to revise our way of looking at nature. Ideally, we should learn to build cities which do not destroy the natural environment. Unless development is properly coordinated and steered in the right direction, people in the cities may well have to suffer the adverse consequences, including uncontrollable floods.

-- Waspada, Medan