Jakarta. Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama has been inspecting the city's preparations in preventing floods, with the rainy season expected to reach its peak in the third week of January.
Basuki said the city has been racing to catch up with the lack of efforts made by former Water Management Agency chief Tri Djoko Sri Margianto, who resigned last month after failing to get several key flood prevention projects off the ground.
As a result for Tri's failure, water levels of up to 70 centimeter high were reported in the flood-prone Kampung Pulo neighborhood in East Jakarta on Sunday, which Basuki blamed on slow dredging works of adjacent waterways.
“We'll just continue to dredge the rivers. We acknowledge the late response from the Water Management Agency in handling the issue, and that's why I replaced [Tri] with a new [interim chief],” Basuki said on Monday, adding that Tri's successor, Teguh Hendrawan, has identified several water pumps that are in need of fixing.
The governor added that the city faces new challenges with shoddy installation and maintenance work of underground cables and pipes by private contractors, whose work clogged drainage and inhibited water flows in some areas, including South Jakarta's Mega Kuningan business district, which was mildly inundated last week.
“We still find inundations in some areas, but the number has significantly decreased and the water is abating faster now,” Basuki told reporters.
The city government had implemented five steps to anticipate floods last year, including river normalization, improvements in infrastructure and the monitoring of water pumps, according to Bambang Suryaputra, Jakarta Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPBD) spokesperson.
“We also recruited around 5,000 disaster volunteers at the district level and expanded the implementation of an early warning system,” Suryaputra said on Sunday.
The Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) has earlier said that this year's rainy season will peak between January and February with strong winds and torrential rains.
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