“If it rains so hard so that I can’t go home, I would rather spend the night in my office. Otherwise, I will brace myself for hours of traffic, but at least I won’t be starving on my way home,” he said.

Another commuter from Depok, West Java, Lusi Irawati said she would eat dinner first before taking the train home from her office in Kuningan, South Jakarta.

“I was stranded in a packed train for five hours on Monday and had nothing to eat,” she recalled.

Depok resident Berlina said she would try to finish all of her tasks in Jakarta as early as possible so she could go home before 5 p.m.

The Jakarta Police Traffic Management Center reported that more than 20 locations across
the city were inundated by rainwater on Monday, 15 of them in South Jakarta.

Thousands of road-users were bogged down until midnight in the capital, while thousands of commuters were stranded by train delays caused by signal failures and flooded railway lines.

On Tuesday, the center reported that at least four locations were still inundated.

Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo called on the residents to view the Monday flooding as the natural result of extreme weather.

He declined to apologize to the people, insisting that the severe gridlock was the result of downpours “far higher in intensity compared to the same period last year”.

“It wasn’t my fault it rained,” he said.

Hari Tirto, head of the information division at the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency, said Monday’s rain was concentrated in South Jakarta and West Jakarta.

Some areas around Kedoya in West Jakarta had 167 millimeters of rain on the day, and an area in Pasar Minggu, South Jakarta, had 155 mm.

“We categorize rainfall of more than 100 millimeters in one day as extreme,” Hari said.

Some 235 millimeters of rain fell during the massive flood in 2007 that swamped 70 percent of  the city, killed at least 57 and forced 450,000 people to evacuate their homes.

Public Works Agency head Ery Basworo said the city’s drainage system could withstand 20 millimeters of rain in one day.

“The capacity of our drainage system is only around 20 percent because the other 80 percent is occupied by garbage or sediment,” he said. (rch)

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