Trash piling up, Jakartans fear disease
Ahmad Junaidi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The City administration is hastily implementing stopgap measures to prevent an outbreak of disease threatened by the mounting piles of trash throughout Jakarta, neglected as a result of the dispute over the Bantar Gebang dump site.
The specter of cholera, diarrhea, dysentery, influenza and bronchitis now lingers over the capital, a result of the authorities' ineptness in dealing with the garbage crisis.
If preventive measures are not consistently pursued, Jakarta could be facing a possible epidemic by Christmas.
Jakartans are also being urged to be more careful in discarding their trash, by either burning it or ensuring that garbage was tightly sealed in plastic bags.
City Health Agency chief Abdul Kholik on Thursday warned that "without proper treatment, the diseases could erupt in two to five days."
Authorities have now resorted to spraying disinfectant chemicals on the garbage, which is lying in the open in temporary garbage lots and in the back of some 700 dump trucks parked in sanitary offices across five mayoralties, to avert a health crisis.
After initiating the spraying on Thursday, authorities said the measure would suffice for five days.
But Health Agency officials soon made a desperate plea for emergency funds as they may not be able to afford the Rp 76 million cost of the next round of spraying.
"We don't know how to finance it if the trash continues to mount," Kholik complained, adding that the cost was Rp 200 per square meter of garbage surface.
He claimed that some 300 health community centers and hospitals in the city had been told to take pre-emptive steps to prepare for an outbreak of disease.
Garbage has been building up since Monday, when the main garbage dump site at Bantar Gebang in Bekasi was closed due to a dispute between the Bekasi mayoralty and the Jakarta administration.
Claims by the Jakarta administration that it had prepared alternative sites have proven to be misleading, and as a result garbage has either been left neglected in temporary community dump sites or on board dump trucks that have nowhere to dispose of it.
Jakarta and Bekasi reportedly continued to negotiate on Thursday, but with little progress. Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso on Thursday could only express his hope that the talks would soon produce results.
The crisis has proven that the administration has no strategy for adequately handling the 25,000 cubic meters produced by the city every day.
According to Kholik, open garbage encourages the growth of larva, which within two to three hours can produce flies and other insects that cause germs to become airborne.
Members of the local council were full of recriminations on Thursday but offered few solutions, focussing instead on past suggestions they had made that could have averted the crisis.
Councillor Tjuk Sudono of the National Mandate Party urged the administration to distribute huge trash bags so garbage would not be left exposed in the open air.
"With the garbage neatly stored, the city buys time to find alternatives for handling it," Tjuk of the council's commission D for development affairs said.
He further rebuked the administration for disregarding past council proposals on waste management, which included constructing a giant waste incinerator.