Residents blame mudflow for clean water crisis

Machfud Junianto was brushing his teeth at a newly installed tap outside the Nurul Ashar orphanage in Jatirejo village, Porong district in the East Java town of Sidoarjo.

The tap was set up by the Sidoarjo Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPLS) soon after water mixed with methane gushed out of the ground near the orphanage, believed to be triggered by the nearby mudflow disaster.

“I had to use the contaminated water since the 14-meter-high gusher a week ago. The water level in our well has dropped and it smells,” he told The Jakarta Post.

Water from the tap may work to replace the contaminated well water, but Machfud and 25 other people living in the orphanage have been urged to take care when using it because of the gas.

“If the flowing water contains sand and smells of gas, we bathe elsewhere. Residents around the orphanage are also worried about facing a clean water crisis,” Machfud said.

Hydrologists earlier warned authorities that the mudflow may threaten supplies of clean water to residents in the surrounding area, but the BPLS played down the warning, instead asking East Java residents not to get worked up.

BPLS deputy of operations Soffian Hadi said the mudflow, which many believe triggered several new geysers across Porong, would not affect the quality or quantity of groundwater.

“We have conducted observations and found no indications that the water geysers would reduce groundwater levels or have an impact on the aquifer layer,” he told the Post.

The mudflow, which began in 2006, and the new geysers around Porong have raised concern among several bottled water companies, which exploit groundwater at nearby Mount Arjuno. They fear the situation would cause a drop in groundwater levels.

The head of the groundwater division at the East Java Energy and Mineral Resources Agency, Anung Manubowo, said the mudflow had a direct impact on the declining quality and quantity of groundwater, an important source of livelihood for residents in the province capital Surabaya and surrounding cities.

“Most of Surabaya’s 2.9 million residents rely on groundwater for cooking and drinking,” he said at a recent discussion on groundwater in Surabaya. He refused, however, to discuss the mudflow, saying it was too political an issue.

The BPLS counts more than 90 water and mud geysers in the disaster area since 2006, spewing a volume of 126,000 cubic meters per day. The BPLS says 90 percent of them also spew methane.

Anung said the drop in water quantity was not only due to the hot mudflow in Porong, but also to many industries illegally drilling deep artesian wells.

“We are also investigating a number of hotels, which have drilled wells without going through supervisory procedures or getting approval from relevant agencies,” he said.

Anung said of the thousands of industries in East Java, only 1,200 had drilling and groundwater use permits from the local energy and mineral resources agency and other related bodies, while the groundwater volume used by the licensed industries reahed 279 million cubic meters a month.