City Public Works Agency will dredge 63 spots in the rivers in September to control notorious seasonal flooding.
The project is targeted to be completed by December, before the next rainy season and corollary seasonal floods that inundate the city, agency head, Budi Widiantoro said Tuesday.
“We expect to complete the project in December, before the rainy season. I heard the BMKG [Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency] has forecast an extended dry season this year,” Budi told The Jakarta Post.
The project is worth Rp 195 billion (US$19.7 million) and will be covered by the provincial budget. The city administration has also allocated another Rp 51 billion to acquire land in several areas surrounding the city’s rivers in order to widen the rivers.
Budi said the agency was still waiting for the ongoing tender to divide the dredging project into 63 segments.
“The bidding participants are scheduled to submit their cost proposals on Aug. 5, and we may have started the project by September,” he said.
The city administration also plans another river dredging project using a Rp 1.5 trillion in loan provided by the World Bank, but the project has been delayed because the administration has not yet received the money from the Finance Ministry.
The World Bank loan would be used to finance a project called the Jakarta Emergency Dredging Initiative, which is expected to return the cycle of huge floods from the current state of once every five years, to once every 25 years.
The administration initially hoped to receive the loan by the end of last year, but it was postponed
until May and delayed again until July and there has been no progress so far.
Governor Fauzi Bowo said the administration was still waiting for the Finance Ministry to process the loan.
“We submitted our proposal to the ministry some time ago, but the process is still taking time,” Fauzi said.
He added that it was impossible for the administration to accelerate the process because there was no government regulation that authorized the provincial administration to directly receive the loan because it was a government-to-government agreement.
Budi said the dredging project financed by the World Bank was shared between the Public Works Ministry and the city’s Public Works Agency.
“Part of the project conducted by the Public Works Ministry has been ongoing,” he said.
Locations of the ministry’s project include Cakung River in East Jakarta, Sunter, Kamal and Angke in North Jakarta and Cengkareng
in West Jakarta. The agency’s project includes rivers in Ciliwung, Gunung Sahari, Krukut and the Pluit dam, he said.
