dikes: lesson learned from the Netherlands.

everyone in Indonesia–especially in Jakarta–must be very sick of flood. yes, as capital town of Indonesia, Jakarta never miss flooding every year, in the rainy season. even there is huge flood every five year! i can never imagine how people in Jakarta still can survive when floods brought away their home furnitures and everything they had owned!

i have one big memory about flood in Jakarta. it was on November last year, when i left home to campus. my class started in the noon, so i used to left home at about 4 PM by transJakarta {kind of MRT here}. since transJakarta is the only one of rapid transportation here, i found something wrong when it trapped into the traffic. i thought that it was usual traffic jam, because it was work hours off at that time. it was rain all day long and i then knew, the traffic was because flooding in one way to my campus.

sigh.

i then sent text to my classmate that probably i will come late to the class. apparently, there just 4 of my classmates that successfully arriving campus! i was about only 2 km more to campus and still got stuck by the traffic, but seeing the crowded wouldn’t roomy {even in 10′!}, i then decided to go out from transJakarta {the driver opened the door since then} and walked home by train.

dropped from the bus, i saw things didn’t go better. the worst thing i’ve ever seen at that time was, the sidewalk was fulled of motorcycles!!! the drivers really take charge of their vehicles rather than pedestrian to keep their motor alright. i really couldn’t make any step at the sidewalk. bad hearted, i then walked the road through the stopped cars.

that’s too bad.

that is just one of the worst thing happened when flood comes to my town. and since then, i really do hope the government will run their program effectively to solve this problem. actually, Jakarta’s government is busy with the flood embankments in four biggest area, but none i see is under development. or maybe i didn’t see it works?

if we take a look the Netherlands, it has the similar geographic condition with the Jakarta. the Netherlands, in its low-lying land condition, have high probability of having flooding. but in 12th century, the Netherlands government started to build dijk or dikes to avoid the flood to come. dikes is built from sand-prone embankment collapsed due to over-saturation, while the soil instead of dry peat is lighter than water so will be potentially unstable in the dry season. these dikes is helped by the windmill to keep the land dries and pump the water behind the dikes back to the sea, so the water won’t come onto the town.

dijk or dikes in the Netherlands

{via Liggett}

to keep their people safe from the flood, the government of the Netherlands made the rule to not living near to the dikes. by keeping the surrounding of dikes free of human living, the duty of windmills and dikes then run effective and efficiently. that is why then the Netherlands is getting far from the flooding problem.

Jakarta has many of homework to do, and for this case, maybe Jakarta should take the lesson learned from the Netherlands.