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Sarini sat at the backdoor of her one-room shack beside the deceptively calm Muara Kali Adem River in North Jakarta. Under a scorching sun one recent afternoon, the 40-year-old wrapped herself in a discolored piece of batik cloth displaying the motif of her native Indramayu in West Java.

She shares her home of used wooden planks with her husband and two children. Together, they’ve braved the wrath of the Muara Kali Adem, including the great flood of 2007, and they wonder when the next one will come.

“I remember the last big flood. It was about 10 p.m. and suddenly the water level rose up to our chests. We all rushed out, trying to save ourselves,” she said.

The residents of the illegal neighborhood, a squatter area on the flood plain of the river, saved themselves that night by crawling to safety through a hole in a thin wall separating the slum from an upscale housing complex next door.

“We built tents in the streets. When the water subsided, we all came back here. Where else could we go?” Sarini said.

Sarini and her family are among more than 150 squatters living alongside the Muara Kali Adem in this community. Across North Jakarta, there are 43,480 households, or more than 150,000 people, living in various squatter settlements, many of them near rivers and canals, according to an April 2008 report by MercyCorps, an international aid organization.

Ester Rahayu also lives in North Jakarta, but the 48-year-old stock trader and a mother of two lives in the upscale Kelapa Gading area. She also remembers the 2007 floods. “I was on my way to take my son to school, but the car’s engine stopped, and then we had to walk in knee-high dirty water,” she said.

Unlike Sarini, Ester and her family were able to check into a nearby hotel to escape the floods. Though the flood was traumatic and inconvenient, Ester said she is not about to move out of Kelapa Gading. “Floods are part of life in Jakarta — where else do you want to go?”

Although they are worlds apart — rich and poor — Ester and Sarini are linked by the massive flood that hit the capital in early February 2007, killing 52 people, displacing 450,000 residents and leaving untold numbers sickened by illnesses ranging from diarrhea to dengue fever. The National Development Planning Agency estimated economic losses from the flood at
Rp 8.8 trillion ($871.2 million).

While Jakarta has been shaken by the occasional earthquake, flooding has so far been the city’s gravest threat. Severe floods in January 1996, February 2002 and February 2007 were particularly dreadful. In 2007, almost 60 percent of the city was plunged into water up to seven meters deep in some areas.

North Jakarta, where Sarini and Ester live, bore the brunt of both the 2002 and 2007 floods, when 39 percent of the district was under water. Those floods, triggered by 72 hours of continuous rain, finally forced the central government and city officials to pay serious attention to this recurring problem, but tackling urban flooding is incredibly complex. In a democratic era, however, city leaders can either do something to tackle flooding or face being voted out of office.

Nature vs. Mankind

Tarjuki, the head of water resource maintenance with the city’s Public Works Department, says the factors that cause the flooding issue are multilayered, and are underpinned by the fact that 40 percent of the city lies below sea level. Second, 13 rivers enter and flow through the city from Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi, in West Java and Banten provinces. Bad habits and sheer human pressure makes matters worse.

“We can always build new infrastructure such as canals or dams, but in my opinion, it’s hardest to control people’s behavior, which plays a major role in Jakarta’s floods,” Tarjuki said.

Rapid urban development is really the heart of the problem. As the Suharto regime centralized the economy, Jakarta increasingly became a destination for throngs of Indonesians seeking a better life. In short order a city that was built by Dutch colonizers to accommodate 800,000 people has been engulfed by more than nine million residents, and up to 12 million during the work week.

According to a World Bank report, around 250,000 people move into the Greater Jakarta area each year. This gives rise to growing squatter areas where people have scant access to infrastructure or government services.

There are now more than 25 million people living in Greater Jakarta, which includes Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi. By 2020, that number is expected to balloon to 35 million. Unchecked urbanization results in housing complexes and shopping malls that block or pave over natural catchment areas.

People like Sarini and her family, who can’t afford proper housing, simply squat along river banks and find jobs as day laborers. Soon, these mini-communities multiply. This exacerbates water contamination and flooding because squatters dump trash and human waste into the waterways.

Over time, the rivers narrow due to the accumulation of waste and silt, their flows lessen, and ultimately water overflows the banks. Experts have said that if Jakarta’s rivers and canals had been dredged regularly, the number of people directly affected by the 2007 floods would have dropped from 2.6 million to only one million.

Data from the Public Works Department shows Jakartans produce 30,000 cubic meters of solid waste per day, 1,800 cubic meters of which ends up in rivers and canals. The city administration says it can only remove about 1,400 cubic meters a day, leaving 400 cubic meters of waste to accumulate every day in the rivers.

Given that a cubic meter is equivalent to 1,000 liters of liquid, that adds up to 400,000 liters of trash collecting in Jakarta’s rivers every day. It all adds up to a mess.

“We are going to help by dredging the city’s rivers and canals, but if the city administration doesn’t come up with good solutions to the solid waste problem, within five years we’ll be back at square one,” said Risyana Sukarma, a water management and environment consultant at the World Bank.

To make matters worse, Jakarta is sinking. Groundwater extraction from 140 meters deep or more by factories, hotels, shopping centers and other developments, as well as backyard wells, has caused the land to sink by an average of 5 to 10 centimeters a year, according to World Bank studies, and up to 25 centimeters or more in the worst-hit areas.

Some areas have already sunk between one and two meters over the past few decades. This subsidence reduces the capacity of the land to absorb rain and floodwater, which in turn increases dependence on dikes and water pumps.

Can Anything Be Done?

For starters, a three-year emergency dredging program, called the Jakarta Emergency Dredging Initiative (JEDI) and nicknamed “No Regrets,” is slated to begin later this year. “We hope this will return those rivers and canals to their original capacity,” said Tarjuki, an official with the Public Works Department.

The city administration is allocating Rp 200 billion for dredging at 76 locations, and the World Bank will fund the rest with a $150 million loan. But it would be hard to blame city residents for their skepticism: for years, they’ve heard claims from city officials that dredging was going to be carried out or was already under way, but it never happened.

In its defense, the city was previously unable to accept World Bank help because central government regulations prohibit local administrations from accepting foreign loans for projects unless it’s a revenue-generating venture. Officials worked around the regulation by arguing Jakarta could be spared billions of dollars in future flood damage, said Hong Joo Hahm, lead infrastructure specialist at the World Bank in Jakarta.

Dredging, however, is not enough, Hahm said. “To make Jakarta flood-free, there are three more major things to do,” he said. These include building an 800-meter waterway connecting the East and West flood canals, and renovating the Manggarai sluice gate in South Jakarta, the Cengkareng drain in West Jakarta and the Cakung drain in East Jakarta.

The city has also floated the possibility of a second landfill to lift pressure on the one at Bantar Gebang in Bekasi, just outside Jakarta, which has reached 90 percent of its capacity.

“That is very important because on rainy days we can collect up to 10 huge dump trucks [worth of garbage] from rivers and canals,” Tarjuki said. “But I think it is more important to educate people to keep from littering in the rivers. Or not to litter at all.”

However, trouble is brewing because the forthcoming dredging project also calls for relocating tens of thousands of squatters living illegally along riverbanks.

“The problem is, these people are not scared of floods. They see flooding as part of their lives,” said Ida Ayu Dharmapatni, a senior operations officer with the World Bank, which is helping the city to tackle the sensitive relocation issue.

The city will have to tread a fine line in enforcing the law without violating human rights or creating a public uproar.

“The most difficult problem is, after we relocate them, they keep coming back to the riverbanks,” said Heru Utara, head of public facilities for North Jakarta district.

Because relocation could take months or even years to resolve, the city agreed to begin dredging in squatter-free areas first. As city residents already know all too well, the clock is ticking on this issue because floods always recur.

“I do hope the Jakarta administration does its best to overcome this problem,” said Ester, the Kelapa Gading stock trader. “It would definitely ease our nerves.”