| Jakarta port area | Music | 00:00 |
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| THOMPSON: These days, few people think of Jakarta as a seaside city. | 00:11 |
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| But for more than 500 years, that’s exactly what it’s been. | 00:18 |
| Thompson walks in port area | It was known as Sunda Kelapa back in the 16th Century but these days that name only refers to this small old port on the city’s northern fringe. This area is known as the old city, | 00:25 |
| Thompson to camera Super: | and it was from here that Greater Jakarta marched south, east and west to become a city of 25 million people. And under the weight of all that, Indonesia’s capital is quite literally sinking. And, unless drastic action is taken, where I’m standing now will be under the sea within 20 years. And it’s got nothing to do with climate change. | 00:42 |
| Flood footage | Music | 01:05 |
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| THOMPSON: Jakarta is a city built on low-lying plains – and that means floods of some sort or other happen all the time. | 01:12 |
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| Even so, when the monsoon rains fell in February last year, Jakartans were not expecting the worst flood for three centuries. | 01:24 |
| Flood mop-up |
| 01:35 |
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| When it was over, 54 people were dead and almost one billion dollars worth of damage was done. | 01:45 |
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| The diagnosis was clear – Jakarta’s floods were getting worse. | 01:56 |
| Machinery and kids in canal in background |
| 02:07 |
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| To find out why this is happening, you’ve got to dig around in the sludge of the city’s filthy waterways. | 02:12 |
| Thompson and Janjaap step aboard boat to cross canal. | JANJAAP: So here we are -- one of the | 02:28 |
| Thompson and Janjaap on boat | most important channels in Jakarta, the Western Flood Channel … THOMPSON: Janjaap Brinkman is a Dutch water engineer contracted to | 02:30 |
| Kids scavenging in channel | the World Bank, which is helping solve Jakarta’s flood problems. THOMPSON: What are the kids looking for in here? | 02:36 |
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| JANJAAP: They look for scraps, for metals, for bottles, plastic, all that kind of stuff. Everybody has their own materials that they're looking for and they sell it. THOMPSON: So nothing goes to waste? JANJAAP: Nothing goes to waste. I even know a guy | 02:45 |
| Thompson and Janjaap on boat | who collects straws, drinking straws, cleans them again and sells them again. | 02:58 |
| Old paintings, pictures, maps | THOMPSON: When the Dutch took over 400 years ago, they brought a lot more to the city than just the new name of Batavia. They also built a complex system of flood channels to protect this city crossed by 13 rivers. The Western Flood Channel used to run alongside Batavia’s western flank. Today it cuts straight through Jakarta’s bloated heart. | 03:07 |
| Kids scavenging in channel. | Because the city’s residents dump their garbage into them, the canals need constant maintenance. | 03:41 |
| Dredging channel | But dredging for 25 years there’s only been haphazard dredging. THOMPSON: And this is dredging we’re seeing behind us? JANJAAP: This is dredging and it's very important because the capacity of this channel reduced a lot | 03:47 |
| Janjaap on boat | about 50 to 80% of the capacity is gone because of the sediments and the solid waste. THOMPSON: So this channel is now operating around 20% capacity? JANJAAP: That's true and that translates to a flood once every 50 years to now one every two years, one every five years. | 04:00 |
| Thompson and Janjaap off boat to walk along bridge | THOMPSON: Indonesia has turned to its former colonisers to help solve its water problems. Hardly surprising, given that seventy percent of Holland is below sea level. | 04:19 |
| Floodgate | Dutch engineers built this massive floodgate 90 years ago. JANJAAP: It was placed in 1919 | 04:32 |
| Janjaap showing plaque to Thompson Super: | after the first big flood was transported safely by this channel, the channel that starts from this gate to the sea. THOMPSON: So it's not a new problem? JANJAAP: It's not a new problem at all. And this channel, though it was built in 1920, still is very important to keep the inner city of Jakarta safe. | 04:40 |
| Hills around Jakarta footage. | THOMPSON: Jakarta is surrounded by hills. But the chronic pollution means you don’t see them from the city except on the clearest of days. | 05:00 |
| Development in Puncak | In recent years, trees have made way for the rampant development of holiday villas. The hills’ ability to absorb rainwater has been radically reduced. | 05:13 |
| Rivers choked with garbage | So now, when it rains swollen rivers are clogged with sediment and garbage. Flood channels are overwhelmed. | 05:26 |
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| Floodgates are useless. JANJAAP: During a very high rainfall in the mountains, and the large floods, the water | 05:34 |
| Janjaap by river | comes up to here and rushes into the city, and rushes into that side of the city and the whole area here | 05:43 |
| Flooding pics | gets flooded, and the whole inner city gets flooded too. | 05:51 |
| Woman washing by river
| THOMPSON: It is the poor living in the slums alongside Jakarta’s waterways who are most vulnerable. | 05:57 |
| Honjoo interview. Super: | HONJOO: Flooding is a phenomenon that really pounds the poor. They are the people who live next to the river embankments, they are the people that | 06:04 |
| Riverbank dwellers | live on the coastal areas, they are the squatters living next to the canals etcetera, so they really, really suffer the most. | 06:12 |
| Honjoo in World Bank team meeting | THOMPSON: Honjoo Hahm leads the World Bank team providing 150 million dollars in loans to help fix Jakarta’s flood channels. HONJOO [to meeting]: I told you there were two reasons | 06:25 |
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| why the flooding is occurring. One is because of urban development, the second is because too much rubbish in the canals… HONJOO: Flooding does not distinguish between wealth | 06:40 |
| Honjoo interview | and you have more and more middle class people that are affected. And in fact the richest of the rich, most powerful person in Indonesia, the president himself, gets affected by flooding. In the way we commute to the office, | 06:51 |
| Cars through floods in city | the roads all get flooded, the rich with their Mercedes Benz are still going be dramatically affected by the floods. You’re immobilised in Jakarta when the floods occur. | 07:03 |
| Wati overlooking development site | THOMPSON: Wati Utami lives in a flood prone area where she works nearby as a housemaid for expatriates. She’s been pressured to sell up her house to make way for an upmarket development next door. THOMPSON: When it rains a lot, near your house, | 07:22 |
| Thompson and Wati looking out over development | does it flood here too? WATI: It all floods. Yeah. | 07:39 |
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| THOMPSON: And do you think it will be worse once the building is finished? WATI: I'm not sure. I’m not sure. | 07:44 |
| Rain falling on development site | THOMPSON: This development is an example of the way Jakarta’s elites are avoiding the city’s water problems. It promises to be flood-proof. | 07:55 |
| Entering Kemang Village | Music | 08:05 |
| Interiors of Kemang Village | THOMPSON: When it’s finished Kemang Village, will cater to every whim of its 10,000 residents. | 08:13 |
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| JOPY: This is the most exciting development at Jakarta now, | 08:22 |
| Jopy takes Thompson on tour | probably becoming top of the town. THOMPSON: Taking me on a tour is marketing director Jopy Rusli. | 08:26 |
| Looking at model of development | JOPY: All the site is twelve hectares and this part here is nine and a half hectare where the first development that we’re going to do. | 08:33 |
| Super: | We’re going to start with one big mall, 130,000 square metres, and 325 suites of hotel. THOMPSON: Lots of swimming pools. JOPY: A lot of swimming pools, two clubs, and also we have a wedding chapel, we have school and we will have a hospital also. | 08:41 |
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| THOMPSON: Everything? JOPY: Everything, everything. Everything you need is here. That's why we call it integrated development. I think it's the solution to what Jakarta people need. | 09:00 |
| Scale model | Music | 09:11 |
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| THOMPSON: Eleven towers of luxury apartments, all sitting high and dry above the city’s flooding woes. JOPY: Through the lifting of the building | 09:18 |
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| by columns. Underneath the water can still pass through and be absorbed to the ground. | 09:30 |
| Thompson and Jopy at model | THOMPSON: So the whole development will sit above floods? JOPY: Right, right. | 09:36 |
| Traffic | Music | 09:40 |
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| THOMPSON: With no effective mass public transport system, traffic congestion in Jakarta rates among the world’s worst. Nine hundred extra motorcycles and 260 new cars are added to the roads every day. Life in this city can be crazy. THOMPSON: When the real world gets just too much, | 09:48 |
| Thompson to camera at Dharmawansa square | Jakarta’s elites can always escape into expensive malls like this one, where every day is a perfect day. | 10:15 |
| Sky, fountains and European streetscape inside Dharmawansa | Music | 10:26 |
| Pacific Place | THOMPSON: Or if you fancy a day at the seaside | 10:42 |
| Thompson to camera in malls | five floors up, try this place. | 10:44 |
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| Music | 10:47 |
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| THOMPSON: And in other malls, without even leaving Jakarta, you can travel the world. | 10:58 |
| Images of little New York, Japan, Morocco. | Music | 11:02 |
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| THOMPSON: But this city’s mall culture is not just innocent escapism for those who can afford it. Every one of them makes the city heavier. And that’s not good thing – because Jakarta is sinking. | 11:11 |
| Views of city from high-rise | The cause is groundwater extraction. Fewer than half Jakarta’s households have water on tap – the rest pump it up from underground. | 11:29 |
| Mall pics | Industrial users, big malls and hotels, dig wells hundreds of metres deep. HONJOO: Big buildings that use deep wells, are big contributors to ground water extraction. But above and beyond that, when a city develops, the city gets heavier and | 11:41 |
| Honjoo. Super: | the combination of water being extracted and creating a vacuum in the aquifer, and the city getting heavier, pushes the city downwards. | 12:05 |
| Tidal flooding pics – 2007 | THOMPSON: The sinking phenomenon now causes Jakarta to flood on days when there’s no rain at all. JANJAAP: On a bright blue sky on June 14 2007, suddenly all north Jakarta got flooded. We were going towards Bali 2007, the last climate conference. | 12:15 |
| Janjaap. Super: | And this was a really big flood, and we could not believe that this was climate change. | 12:37 |
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| Actually, the cycle of the moon is far more important causing these floods in Jakarta than climate change. | 12:43 |
| Floodwaters to airport road | THOMPSON: Janjaap calculated that this flooding was entirely predictable. To show us what he meant, in early May this year, he suggested we pay a visit to Jakarta’s airport which runs along low-lying land near the sea. | 12:53 |
| Travellers scrambling into the back of trucks | And this is what we found. Floodwaters which were forcing travellers to abandon their cars. | 13:09 |
| Passenger vox pop | PASSENGER: No choice. | 13:16 |
| Flooding – trucks | THOMPSON: As the predictions proved correct, Jakarta’s administration began to take notice. The cycle of the moon and the angle of the earth has caused king tides since time began. The difference now, is that as Jakarta sinks – it’s slipping below sea level. | 13:21 |
| Filling sandbags, building up sea defences | THOMPSON: It was next predicted that Jakarta would flood again in early June. We headed to the city’s northern shores, and found that the message was getting through to the poor people who live here. High tide was due at 10 o’clock at night and work was underway to bolster the sea wall with sandbags. | 13:48 |
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| As the water went up, news came through that a shift in weather patterns way out to sea meant that this night’s rise would be 20 centimetres less than expected. | 14:13 |
| Night sequences | This time Jakarta was lucky. It was short of a disaster, but an ominous taste of things to come. | 14:30 |
| Thompson to camera walking to flooded area at night | THOMPSON: The people living down near the sea wall have been lucky, the sandbags have held. It’s a different story up here, there’s been a breach and the streets are flooded – we’re just going to go and have a look. | 14:39 |
| Flooded area at night | We find the sea is rushing in much more than the locals are used to. | 14:55 |
| Aswati standing in flood waters | From her family shop, Aswati has spent her whole life watching the waters come and go. ASWATI: I've been living here since I was very little, when I was a baby. The kind of floods we usually have are not this big, just regular ones. | 15:05 |
| Aswati next to the rushing water | But these past three days, the floods have been big. I'm not sure what'll happen tonight. | 15:20 |
| Aswati riding home through water on back of three wheel pedicab | THOMPSON: As the ocean keeps coming, a journey by “becak” is the only way for Aswati to get home safely, where the sea is lapping at her door. Last year, it was less accommodating. | 15:30 |
| Aswati showing Thompson how high the flood was in her house | ASWATI: We had to move upstairs. The flood was around a metre high. | 15:47 |
| Thompson riding through floodwaters in the back in “becak” | THOMPSON: So this has become normal life for these people, and it could continue, except for the fact that Jakarta is now sinking up to six centimetres a year and sometimes more. | 15:55 |
| Flooding pics | Now, in 18 years time these king tides will return and this entire area could become uninhabitable. | 16:06 |
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| JANJAAP: The city is expected to be about 1 metre lower than at the current position, | 16:17 |
| Janjaap interview. Super: | And that means that the sea will come in permanently and floods the first two, three, four kilometres of the coastal area of Jakarta. And we expect that it will be completely unliveable and it will not be possible to live there if nothing is done. | 16:23 |
| Flooding pics | Music | 16:42 |
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| THOMPSON: The choices are stark – and none of them are easy. Either stop groundwater extraction or build a massive sea wall off Jakarta’s coast. If not, millions of people will be permanently displaced. | 16:49 |
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| And if sea flooding coincides with heavy rains in Jakarta and the surrounding hills, things will be even worse. HONJOO: “The perfect storm”, if you will -- | 17:12 |
| Honjoo interview. Super: | the perfect combination of the most worst case scenario that Jakarta can endure. | 17:27 |
| Janjaap interview | JANJAAP: So we're very concerned with what will happen in the next 10 to 18 years. The flooding from the sea, when that combines with the flood during the wet season, like the floods that we saw in 2007, 2002, 1996 -- real big floods -- this will bring disaster to Jakarta. and effect millions and millions of people. | 17:35 |
| Flood mop up operations | Music | 18:04 |
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| THOMPSON: A lack of planning and maintenance has placed Indonesia’s capital in this precarious position. Now it’s up to the city administration to settle on solutions. | 18:09 |
| Flood pics | Without action almost a third of Jakarta will be lost to the sea within the next 20 years. | 18:24 |
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| Music | 18:31 |
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| Reporter: Geoff Thompson Camera: David Anderson Editor: Bryan Milliss Research: Lisa Martin Ake Prihantari |
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