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Jakarta floods hit street vendors hard despite minor impact on city's growth
The Rp 960 billion losses might slash Jakarta's economic growth by 0.025 percent this year, said Bank Indonesia's Jakarta office head Hamid Ponco Wibowo.
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Fatimah, a 62-year-old owner of a small kiosk in flood-stricken Kayu Putih subdistrict in East Jakarta waits for customers inside her kiosk on Wednesday. (JP/Dzulfiqar Fathur Rahman)
R
osuli, the owner of a small kiosk in flood-stricken Kayu Putih in East Jakarta, had to move the goods from the shelves to the loft as water inundated his shop on Feb. 25, forcing him to close for the whole day.
“The rain was too strong. It did not stop overnight”, the 68-year-old, who has been running the kiosk together with his wife Fatimah for five years, said on Wednesday.
He said closing his shop that day had cost him Rp 300,000 (US$21.19) as that was what he usually made a day by selling daily necessities such as snacks, bottled beverages and cigarettes.
The floods also forced him to make a bulk purchase worth around Rp 5 million to replace goods ruined by floodwater, said Fatimah. They were also forced to replace their refrigerator twice, as it broke in the New Year's Day flood and then again in late February.
"I could not eat and sleep for two nights. I cried. I just felt like going back to my hometown," said Fatimah, who moved to Jakarta from Bangkalan regency in Madura Island, East Java, with her husband and children in 1982.
Jakarta has been hit with extreme rainfall that led to a string of big floods this year. The New Year’s Day flood according to the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) claimed at least 60 lives and displaced 27,971 people in Greater Jakarta and Banten.
Another massive flood hit the capital city and its periphery on Feb. 25, killing three Jakartans among nine total casualties in Jakarta, Bekasi and South Tangerang, in addition to displacing 9,297 people.
