Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan said the city is making efforts to provide short term solutions to Jakarta’s flooding problems, but will need experts’ opinion in order to formulate a long-term plan to tackle the problem.
“We will discuss long-term solutions with experts. We want the solutions to be environmentally friendly,” Anies said at City Hall on Wednesday as quoted by kompas.com .
Flooding has become an annual occurrence in the capital, which often force residents to evacuate their homes and also lead to long traffic jams in the city’s roads.
As a coastal city built on a swampy plain with roughly 40 percent of its land sitting below sea level, a slight increase in sea level coupled with a bit of heavy rain is enough to cause flood in the capital. This is made worse by the crumbling infrastructure to cope with excess water, experts say.
As a short-term measure, Anies said he had ordered his subordinates to repair dikes across the capital to regulate water levels. One of them is the Jati Padang dike in South Jakarta, which Anies recently visited, after it collapsed following heavy rain and strong winds that inundated the area.
The government is also setting up water pumps in the city to try to reduce flooding and is building a large-scale sea wall to keep out the encroaching ocean .