Jakarta’ river dredging project to start next year

The Jakarta administration says a long-awaited project to dredge 13 rivers in the city will start next year.

“We have provided the regulations that will provide the legal protection for these projects,” Mohammad Tauchid, the governor’s special assistant on development and the environment, said recently as quoted by tempointeraktif.com.

Mohammad said the World Bank has agreed to loan the central government Rp 631 billion (US$70.61 million) and the Jakarta administration Rp 724 billion for the project under the Jakarta Urgent Flood Mitigation Project and the Jakarta Emergency Dredging Initiative (JEDI).

Mohammad said that the administration would first remove legal residents living along the rivers’ banks to low-cost suburban apartments.

“We will send those without Jakarta ID cards back to their home provinces,” he said.

Substantial floods hit the capital in 1996, 2002 and 2007, although the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency previously dismissed notions of a five-year cycle that would culminate in 2012.

Meanwhile the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecasted that Indonesia would experience 70 percent more rain than normal this raint season due to the “La Niña” climate phenomenon,

which is associated with cooler-than-normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.