Sand mining worsens erosion in Tanjung Kait
Multa Fidrus, The Jakarta Post, Tangerang
Illegal sand mining has caused severe erosion in the Tangerang coastal area of Tanjung Kait. Dozens of hectares of land in the area, on which there used to be houses, shrimp and fishponds, have been reclaimed by the sea.
The only evidence of the many houses, which include those of a residential complex built by PT Shangrila, is rubble along the beach. Hundreds of people used to live on the land and have been resettled to other places.
If the sand mining continues, three villages of the coastal area -- Marga Mulya, Tanjung Anom and Karang Serang -- will eventually disappear into the sea and thousands of residents will have to be resettled.
Mirwan, 46, an owner of a food and beverage stall near the beach in Tanjung Anom village, said that he and several other residents who used to own hectares of land along the beach now had to live on land belonging to others.
"My home and my land were about 300 meters from here," he told The Jakarta Post while pointing out to sea from the beach where he had built a small bamboo hut.
But despite it all, illegal mining continues unabated and local officials are powerless to stop the sand mining.
In Marga Mulya village, hundreds of local residents daily dredge sand from the nearest beach, while dozens of trucks come and go to transport the sand.
"We can earn Rp 150,000 daily from sand mining. We can sell one pickup truck of sand for Rp 80,000, and we are paid as soon as the sand is loaded onto a truck," Madroi, a local sand miner, told the Post.
Madroi said he and other local sand excavators could collect at least two pickup trucks of sand per day. The local sand miners use bamboo rafts to take the sand from the beach.
According to Wardi RS, the village secretary of the village administration, attempts had been made to stop residents from mining sand but to no avail.
"It's a dilemma for village officials to prevent residents from digging sand. The majority of the villages' total population of 6,259 people do not have fixed jobs. They rely too much on sand mining as a main source of earnings," he said.
"Once we tried to force them to halt the activity, but residents then staged a rally to protest the village chief's ban on sand mining," he said, adding that it was a matter of the villagers earning enough money to feed their families.
Chief of Tanjung Anom village M. Ali said that the beach erosion had fortunately been minimized due to the establishment of a 800-meter-long breakwater along the beach built by the Tangerang regency administration. The stone breakwater is also used by local fishermen to moor their traditional boats.
"However, waves still continue to erode other parts of the villages' 2.5-kilometer-long beach. Over the past 15 years, at least one kilometer of the beach has been claimed by the sea," he said, adding that the main cause of the erosion was the rampant sand mining along the beach.
"I have repeatedly called on residents, through written letters and face to face discussions, to halt the sand mining as it causes environmental damage, but to no avail.
"They always say it is a matter of filling their stomachs, which makes me dizzy when they reason like that," he said, adding that if a breakwater had not been built, the whole coastal area would have been washed away by now.
Separately, Firdaus, chief of Karang Serang village in Sukadiri district, said he was also powerless to stop the sand mining.
"I think the government should take stern measures against residents so that they halt the activity," he said. "To save the villages from erosion, there is no other way but to build a breakwater along the beach at a total cost of Rp 1 billion.
"We want the government to take a look at the condition of the beach here and build a breakwater. It's the only way to halt sand mining as a breakwater would push the sand further into the sea and make it very hard to mine it," he remarked.