TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
The sinking villages: Seawater creeps into houses in Central Java
Residents in two villages in Demak, Central Java, are forced to live with seawater inside their houses.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
A house is surrounded by seawater in Sriwulan village, Demak regency, Central Java. Buildings on the northern coast of the regency are now surrounded by seawater from the Java Sea due to rampant coastal erosion. (JP/Donny Fernando)
A
t first glance, Morosari hamlet in Bedono village in Central Java's Demak looks like most traditional waterfront villages in Indonesia. It has a main road going through the village, with houses of fish farmers as well as their ponds on each side.
But when people take a look around the village, it is clear that parts of it, including dozens of houses, have been submerged under water. The sea has crept out into the village, forcing residents to live in their sinking houses. Some even have to live with seawater reaching up to their windows.
"Most of these houses are still inhabited despite being inundated day and night," Morosari resident Saiful Muhammad Arif, 32, told The Jakarta Post. "These people don't have much choice; it is almost impossible for them to leave this village because no one will buy their houses."
Saiful is no exception. When he was still an elementary school student in the late 1990s, he would need to walk two kilometers through residential complexes, rice fields as well as fish ponds to get to the beach.
Now, he does not need to go to the sea as it has come to his house. Saiful’s family has lost its backyard to the rising seawater.
Massive coastal erosion in the regency began with large-scale clearance of mangrove forests along the coast in the 1990s to create fishponds. Things got worse with the launch in 1994 of a reclamation project to build an industrial zone in Terboyo, a district in the neighboring city of Semarang with a coast located next to Demak.
