0 350,000 Residents to Be Relocated in Rp 250b Project to Widen Ciliwung

The Jakarta administration plans to spend Rp 250 billion ($25.7 million) this year to acquire land for widening the Ciliwung River, as part of wider ongoing efforts at flood mitigation. Rudy Siahaan, the head of the Jakarta Public Works Office, said on Saturday that in addition to widening the waterway, the administration also planned to dredge it to increase the flow of water. “We want to widen the Ciliwung to an ideal width, which will increase the flow rate and allow the river to handle higher volumes of water without the danger of spilling over,” he said. 

He added that the target was to increase the Ciliwung’s peak flow rate from the current 480 cubic meters per second to 750 cubic meters per second. Rudy said that as part of the plan, the city administration was consulting with Christophe Girot, the chair of landscape architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ). “[Girot] already met with the deputy governor [Basuki Tjahaja Purnama] on Friday,” he said. “They talked about the landscape concept along the bans of the Ciliwung [once the widening project begins]. There will be more detailed discussions on Monday.” 

Rudy said the aim was to ensure that once widened, the river would not be constricted again by the unfettered development of slum dwellings — a phenomenon that has been widely blamed for the narrowing of the waterway and regular floods that occur whenever there is sustained heavy rain in the city or in upstream areas through which the Ciliwung winds. Rudy also said that while the city would be responsible for freeing up the necessary land, the actual widening project would be carried out by the Public Works Ministry. 

Subandrio Pitoyo, the ministry’s director general of rivers and coasts, said separately that an estimated 71,000 households, or around 350,000 people, would have to be relocated from the banks of the Ciliwung as part of the project. He said that to ensure the restored river flow was not compromised again, there would have to be strip of land 15 to 30 meters wide on either bank that would have to be kept free from all types of settlements or development. 

The city administration is also working on another project, this one by the sanitation department, to set up nets at the city borders of all 13 rivers flowing into Jakarta to snag trash before it piles up in the bends and narrower sections of the river closer to the city center. “We’ll set up the nets in such a way that they catch the most foreign objects possible, but don’t restrict the flow of the water,” Rudy said. “The plan is to routinely clean out the nets, then put them back in. We haven’t discussed the budget for this project yet, because we’re still going over the technical details first.”

source : the jakarta globe