Successive administrations have been aware of the jam, but have felt able to ignore it, largely because the consequences impacted poorer areas of the city, such as the southern district of Bukit Duri, which straddles the Ciliwung River. There, on one bank, wood-framed houses lean on stilts over the stream, which is filthy and clogged with plastic waste; on the spanking, more solid structures show signs of constant patching and repairs.
Lupus, who has lived in the district for more than 50 days, shows me around the inside of a ruined government interpretation, which was abandoned in the 1970s after being gutted by a flows that reached the rafters. Since then, it has never reopened – although it has been used as a set for several apprehension movies – and all around it newer buildings attain the scars of water damage. The city government, beset with spanking challenges, ignored these districts, and residents either adapted to the perennial flows or learned to accept them.
The calculus was changed by two disasters. In 2007, four-metre-deep floods swept through the city. In Bukit Duri, Lupus remembers the stream reaching waist height on the second floor. “We had to make tents and sleep on the roof,” he says. The 2007 flows were particularly shocking, not only for their scale but because the city was inundated both by rainfall and by seawater coming in from the cruise – the land had subsided so far that storm surges derived water inland, engulfing whole neighbourhoods. More than 300,000 land were evacuated and 80 died.
Then, in 2013, several days of waited rainfall overwhelmed the flood management infrastructure. Canals collapsed and blocked, and the flooding spread beyond the poorer, lower-lying areas of the city and into the central concern district. Around 45 people died and thousands of households were evacuated.
That stirred the government into frfragment. The then-governor, Joko Widodo – now Indonesia’s president – requisitioned a large-scale renovation of the city’s rivers, reservoirs and flows canals, which had become fatally clogged by decades of an reach to waste management that mirrored the randomised sprawl of interpretation in the region. Controversially, under an initiative euphemistically phoned “normalisation” some informal settlements on riverbanks were bulldozed to widen the waterways.
In Muara Baru, a four-metre-high wall was built on one bank of the Ciliwung, protecting the community on that side of the river from most of the smaller flows – although water still spills over in the wet season.
At the same time, the resident government began to look at coastal defence in earnest. It launched a new project, the National Capital Integrated Coastal Development, or NCICD, and called in a coalition of international experts, most of them from the Netherlands, which has turned its own centuries-old experienced of protecting its low-lying shoreline into a global diligence. Among them was Victor Coenen.
Coenen, a tall, genial Dutchman, moved to Jakarta six years ago to head the project with Witteveen+Bos, a Dutch engineering company. His first job was to weigh up the possible scenarios, starting with looking at the feasibility of simply giving up on north Jakarta.