Dozens of Water Management Agency workers staunched the flow of the Pulo River in Kampung Air, Jati Padang subdistrict, Pasar Minggu, South Jakarta, with sand bags after its embankment was breached on Monday.

This followed the heavy downpour that hit the area on Sunday, which increased the water level of the river that is located adjacent to residents’ houses.

Water flowing through the 1-meter breach inundated about 100 houses on Sunday afternoon.

Resident Maisaroh, 64, had to remove all her household items from her badly damaged house, which is about 20 m from the embankment.

“I was away when the flood occurred. My neighbor called me, telling me that my house was destroyed by the flood,” she told The Jakarta Post on Monday as she was emptying her house and getting ready to take refuge at a nearby mosque with other residents.

Floods are nothing new to her.

Maisaroh and her husband have been living next to the river for 20 years. But Sunday’s incident caused the most damage, she said, pointing to a collapsed wall.

Despite the loss, she felt grateful that she and her husband were not at home during the flood.

“Otherwise, we would have been trapped by the flood. That would have been very scary,” Maisaroh said.

A video of the flood, which was shared on social media, showed a resident clinging to a motorcycle in waist-high water.

Burhan Ahmad, the head of neighborhood unit (RT) 03 in Kampung Air, said at least 100 houses were damaged and 190 people were evacuated on Sunday. “People were panicking. Parents immediately evacuated their children because the water was up to 1 m deep.”

The damaged embankment was constructed by local residents to prevent floodwater from entering their houses during the rainy season.

They used any material they could lay their hands on, such as sacks of sands cemented together.

An unstable foundation and piles of trash underneath the embankment made it prone to collapse because residents did not regularly maintain it.

This is not the first time that the embankment has been breached — parts of it collapsed in January this year and in November last year.

The embankment has been repaired countless times by local residents and the Jakarta administration, which also made the walls of the embankment higher to prevent the river from overflowing.

South Jakarta Water Management Office head Holi Susanto said the current repairs would take about a week. However, he expressed doubt that it would help prevent future floods.

Holi said the area was actually a water catchment area, which was off-limits to any type of building.

He noted that the houses also violated zoning laws because they were built on the river’s banks.

“The repairs are only for the short term. We have also made some waterways nearby, but it is not effective,” Holi said, adding that the solution for the recurring floods was river normalization, which could lead to residents being relocated.

Previously, Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan said he would proceed with river normalization as part of flood mitigation in the capital with a program he dubbed river naturalization.

Observers said the reason why Anies had not yet relocated residents was because of the pledge he made when he was campaigning to be Jakarta governor not to evict them.

Bambang Hidayah, the head of the Public Works and Housing Ministry’s Ciliwung-Cisadane Flood Control Office (BBWSCC), said flood mitigation efforts in the capital was put on hold because the administration had not yet acquired any land for the ministry to proceed with the project. (das)

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