Pluit residents brace for more floods
Leony Aurora, The Jakarta Post , Jakarta
The sky was bright and the roads dry on Saturday, but residents of Pluit and Penjaringan subdistricts in North Jakarta were still anxiously awaiting the rainy days to come.
Many welcomed in the new year equipped with buckets, to remove the water which had seeped into their houses. Floodwater levels on the roads in Pluit housing complex ranged between 10 cm and 80 cm.
Although by Friday afternoon, the area was bustling with activity as residents pulled together to minimize the impact of the flood.
When The Jakarta Post visited the pumps at Pluit dam on Saturday, which is the outlet to the Java Sea, the conveyor lifts of the waste filter were being replaced.
Of the eight pumps stationed there only four were operating, one was broken and the other three were on standby. Each pump has a maximum capacity of 4.2 cubic-meters of water per second. Three recently purchased pumps will not be installed until March.
"We only use six pumps at the most, to keep the water level at the normal 190 centimeters below sea-level. The other two are on standby in case of an emergency," said Santoso, a pump operator who has worked there for 37 years.
On Dec. 31, the water level in the dam was 85 cm above sea-level and was rising fast, by 10 cm per hour. But the pumps are only capable of lowering the water level by 50 cm in 24 hours.
On a street corner near Megamal Pluit shopping mall, workers were busily installing new pumps and pipes. "The water started to recede from the street on Friday afternoon," said Yos, a resident of Pluit Permai, as he watched the workers.
The mall management provided two extra pumps to compliment the two available ones -- of which one was broken -- to remove excess water from the gutter around the mall to the Muara Angke trench.
"The mall is responsible for the flooding. Before its existence in 1995, the land which it stands on was a basin which functioned as a water catchment area," he added.
Hebert, 62, who has lived in a house in front of the mall for over a decade, agreed with Yos.
Families living in the area had gathered money to raise the trench's levee by six metres and to buy two portable pumps after the 2002 flood, he said.
"But I am not clear as to what the community is doing now. Nevertheless, the mall management should put more effort into managing the floods," Hebert remarked, adding that people in his neighborhood kept mostly to themselves.
Hebert said that he understood that the administration had to manage the whole city, but "it (Pluit dam) floods every year, something must be done."
The Meteorology and Geophysics Agency has forecast 26 to 28 rainy days in January, with rain intensity close to that during the 2002 floods in Jakarta. At that time, water inundated 168 of the 262 subdistricts in the capital for days.