T

he planned major overhaul of Jakarta’s main waterways did not materialize this year.

The city administration can only afford to repair intermediary and micro water channels. This, experts say, does little to address the problem of flooding in the city.

Urban and spatial planning expert Yayat Supriyatna of city-based Trisakti University said that the city administration spent 2011 focusing on lower-tier drainage network.

“Improvement of intermediary and micro water channels only helps the city tackle inundations during and after heavy rains, preventing choking traffic congestion,” Yayat told The Jakarta Post recently.

“This option, although not actually offering any effective solution to the flooding problem, makes sense financially,” he said.

“Major repair work like river dredging and widening is very expensive. Clearly, the city can not afford it,” Yayat said.

Governor Fauzi Bowo’s administration has been waiting for the last two years for the Finance Ministry to deliver US$150 million from a World Bank loan to pay for the Jakarta Emergency Dredging Initiative (JEDI) to dredge the city’s main rivers.

Under the JEDI program, a joint project of the Public Works Ministry and the City Public Works Agency, 13 rivers would be dredged, including the Cakung River in East Jakarta, the Sunter, Kamal and Angke rivers in North Jakarta and the Ciliwung River.

It has been decades since the capital saw its main waterways overhauled. The Public Works Agency has identified 123 of the most flood-prone streets throughout the city. Improvement projects were completed to prevent flooding in 39 of those streets last year, with work for the other 84 expected to be completed before the end of this year.

Jakarta’s drainage system is the legacy of the 1960s city-spatial planning, consisting of a supposedly comprehensive network of 13 natural and some artificial rivers flowing through Jakarta, along with their tributaries, drains and canals.

The National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) has said that Jakarta’s rivers and waterways do not have the capacity to drain water from torrential rains quickly enough to prevent flooding.

BNPB said that the limited drainage capacity would inevitably lead to the city suffering significant floods during the peak of the rainy season in January 2012.

Separately, Tarumanegara University urban and spatial planner Suryono Herlambang, said that the city drainage system would be put to test during the rainy season peak. “These past few years we have seen some drainage improvements. The East Flood Canal [BKT] operation in 2009 was one of the major advancements,” Suryono said.

“But whether the improvement is good enough, we have yet to see,” he added.

The Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency has forecast high rainfall in Jakarta until early March, while US meteorologists warn that Indonesia may experience 70 percent more rain than normal this rainy season due to the climate phenomenon of “La Niña” .

Both Yayat and Suryono, however, agreed that the city should be consistent in its flood management work in the years to come.

Yayat called on tighter requirements for, or even a moratorium on, major development in the southern part of the city, which serves as the front-line catchment area for water coming from upstream regions in West Java.