Prakosa claims cause of deadly Sumatran flood not known yet

Apriadi Gunawan and Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Medan/Jakarta

The government sparked more confusion as to the cause of the flash flood in a resort town in North Sumatra recently as a minister said on Wednesday that only a preliminary conclusion as to its cause had been reached so far.

Minister of Forestry M. Prakosa told the House of Representatives on Wednesday the conclusion was based on video footage taken on Nov. 6 by a helicopter in the vicinity of Bukit Lawang, which was hit by the flood.

"I must say that our statement is a preliminary conclusion," he told a hearing with the House's forestry commission on Wednesday.

The video footage was taken by a team comprising Mike Griffiths and Yarrow Robertson of the Leuser Management Unit, Johnson Panjaitan of the Indonesian Forum on the Environment (Walhi) and Adi Susmianto from the Ministry of Forestry.

The Leuser Management Unit is a European Union-funded organization devoted to the preservation of the Leuser ecosystem.

Prakosa said a government team would conduct a probe next week to determine the definitive cause of the flood, which killed at least 140 people.

During the meeting, legislator Anton Sihotang of the Golkar faction said the government could not blame nature for the flood that destroyed the Bukit Lawang tourist resort.

"Supposedly, it is natural factors that caused the flood. But, why don't you find out why the area is no longer able to accommodate the water. If the area was in good condition, heavy rain would not be a problem," he told the minister and his assistants.

Anton, who is a member of the House's fact finding team investigating the Bukit Lawang disaster, said he had noticed several logs with numbers on them at the scene.

"The logs were well-cut and clean. Could these be fallen trees?" he asked.

Prakosa said that the government would only know for sure what happened after the team completed its analysis. But, he asserted that the government was committed to replanting cleared land in the Mount Leuser National Park, as well as other locations around the country.

"What we have to do is reforestation and clearing houses from riverbanks to prevent similar disaster from occurring in the future," he said.

However, the forestry ministry and local administration will have to act quickly as on Wednesday a group representing tourism interests called on the North Sumatra administration to reopen the Bukit Lawang resort.

Solahuddin, the secretary of the Indonesian Travel Agents Association, argued that Bukit Lawang had gained its reputation among foreign and local tourists based on its natural scenery.

Most of the structures that were swept away by the flood were restaurants, hostels and other tourism facilities lining the riverbanks.

Early this week, the government claimed the disaster in Bukit Lawang had nothing to do with rampant deforestation by illegal loggers in the Mount Leuser National Park, which is located near the resort.

The government blamed heavy rain for causing landslides in dozens of areas on the upper reaches of the Bahorok river. The mud and uprooted trees, the government claimed, had created dozens of natural dams behind which water had built up, which then burst when unusually heavy rain fell.

The North Sumatra Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said that the rain in Bukit Lawang amounted to between 40 and 100 millimeters in one hour when the disaster took place.

However, the agency had no data on rainfall records in the area.

Several non-governmental organizations working in the environmental field insisted that widespread deforestation in the Mount Leuser National Park had triggered the landslides.

The experts believe that the destruction of parts of the Leuser ecosystem would definitely damage other parts.

Illegal logging has long been rampant in Indonesia, and causes billions of dollars in state losses annually. Most of the illegal logs and timber are exported abroad.