T

he city administration plans to build one more gate at South Jakarta's Manggarai sluice gates to regulate the water flow better.

"The new gate would be installed next to the existing ones, requiring the government to acquire some land plots," Pitoyo Subandrio, head of the Ciliwung-Cisadane Flood Bureau at the Public Works Ministry, said on Saturday.

"The new gate will reduce flooding because the water will run more smoothly than before."

Pitoyo said the space for the gates, which were built in the 1920s by the Dutch government, would be widened by a dozen meters.

The width of a gate is about six meters, excluding the pillars.

Included in the Manggarai revamp is the clearing of the areas along the Ciliwung River, from the Casablanca bridge to the Manggarai sluice gate.

Flood management expert JanJaap Brinkman from the Netherlands Water Research Institute (Deltares) confirmed the urgency of an additional gate in Manggarai.

"The Manggarai gates need to be improved because they are too small. At this moment it is two gates, but it needs to be three gates," Brinkman, who is also the team leader of Flood Hazarding Mapping 2 at the Public Works Ministry, said.

Brinkman was speaking after the signing of an agreement between Indonesia and the Netherlands in the fields of meteorology, water management, climate change and early warning systems.

The administration is currently running flood mitigation projects in anticipation of the rainy season.

It is now dredging 12 waterways across the city, including in Pademangan River and Mati canal (in North Jakarta), Cakung River (East Jakarta) and Grogol in West Jakarta.

The Rp 23 billion (US$2.04 million) project is set to dredge 243,322 cubic meters of garbage out of the canals. The canals range from 467 meters to 3,533 meters long.

The administration is also working on the East Flood Canal project, which is expected to be completed by the end of this year. The canal will be the primary flood control mechanism for East and North Jakarta.

The 23.5-kilometer East Flood Canal will stretch across 11 subdistricts in East Jakarta and two subdistricts in North Jakarta.

PT Pembangunan Jaya Ancol Tbk, developer of the Ancol recreational area, is building another five submersible water pumps at its site in anticipation of floods in February.

"We are building three new water pumps in West Ancol and two more in East Ancol to add to the existing 62 pumps; we hope they will be finished by February," Nurvita Sari, the developer's manager of property maintenance, said.

The new and existing pumps, each able to pump 30 cubic meters of water per minute, will drain water from households in Ancol to the Ancol River.

"After the water reaches Ancol River, it's the city's public works agency's responsibility to channel the water to Pluit and Sunter dams," she said.

The Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG), said that in February the sea level would rise 1.2 meters above normal levels due to a high tide, with the possibility of heavy downpours.