Routine Flooding
Nowadays, flood is the routine national disaster in Indonesia. The distructive power of flood is devastating. Even recently floods devastated the capital city of Indonesia, Jakarta. When the flood comes, it always engenders loss
The problem is so contradictive. On one hand, Indonesia is a rich country for the wealth of natural resources but on the other hand, Indonesia also keeps a big potential for any natural disasters. The quality of human resources was not supported by a sufficient knowledge. The human resources have not recognized the sustainable development for both economics and environment. In example, the development for economy is not balanced with the promotion of the environmental conservation. Humans are not afraid to jeopardize the existence of a harmonized environment. Because of that, the nature put revenge on what human’s act. One of them is in the form of flood. Flood is a routine phenomenon encountered in some areas with a big loss. We could see how a massive amount of water attacked Jakarta in February 2007. The loss in Jakarta area reached 8.6 billion within only five days. The loss is equal to 48% of Local Government’s Budget for the infrastructure development in 2006. We should not also forget that flood happening in the era has got 263 416 refugees. Based on the data from the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB), during the year of 2012 there have been 188 and 28 floods accompanied by a landslide in Indonesia.
Let us evaluate the case happening in Jakarta. Jakarta is one of the cities that is familiar with the problem of flooding. There are two main factors that caused the flooding in Jakarta; the natural factor and human factor. Let’s focus on the human factor as the starter of the issue. Let’s take a look on the number of people living in the Ciliwung River Basin. There are more than 34.000 families living surround it. Those people who live beside the river has decreased the sediment quality. Another negative externality of the number of the inhabitant near by Ciliwung River is when people litter the environment, for example they throw the rubbish to river, so that river becomes full of rubbish and impede the course of the river water then river water overflowed into the streets. Moreover, flood can happen because of the heavy rain. And there is not water absorbing. So, that water can’t absorb to the soil and water float to the streets.
However, nowdays the government of Jakarta had starting to overcome the flooding, in the way of build the smart tunnel which is not only has a fuction to prevent the flooding but also has another function , such asa highway, city sewerage, underground drainage, and as city utility network. The governor of Jakarta, Joko Widodo will started this project to avoid the flooding , because he thinks that if the floodig left unchecked, the point of flooding in Jakarta could even increase. Besides working on projects such as dredging and conventional normalization rivers, Jakarta needs a breakthrough project to prevent flooding back came. Not only government , but Jakarta’s society has also do some activity to support the goverment in order to overcome the flooding. For example the community in Kelurahan Rawa Badak Utara, Kecamatan Koja, north jakarta togather cleaned up their environment from the rubbish. Well, not only Jakarta’s community that can do that. We as a student should also put more effort to save the environment.
Let’s see the one of senior high school in Palembang, SMAN Sumtera Selatan (sampoerna academy). As part of their requirement to be graduated from their school, they need to fullfill two hundred hours of a community service. One of the activities that they have done couple months ago was to clean the ditches for the areas in a market called as Pasar Buah. This area is known as one of the areas with flooding issues each year. Then, the simple thing that they could do is simply cleaning the tunnel and ditches. The effort was such a success. They also opened the people’s mind to do the same thing.
To sum up, we as a human should preserve and save our environment from anything that can broke the harmonization of it. So, not only flooding, but we also can avoid another disaster.