Key river suffers upstream, downstream pollution

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Fri, 12/11/2009 11:16 AM

Up a creek without a paddle: A survey team motors through the Citarum River estuary in Muara Gembong district, Bekasi. Despite frequent tidal floods, the river bank is home to many people who come from around the country to earn a living as fishermen. The Citarum River has often been called the world’s dirtiest river. Courtesy of Cita-Citarum/Diella Dachlan

Despite the country’s ambitious plans to provide sustainable access to clean water for 80 percent of the urban population by 2015, its capital is still struggling to fix an enduring problem facing one of its key rivers.

The target, set in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), starkly contrasts with the fact that the Citarum River, one of the most vital sources of drinking water for Jakarta, is often referred to as the world’s dirtiest river.

Saiful, the new chairman of the Association of Indonesian Tap Water Companies (Perpamsi), said last Thursday in Batam only 40 percent of the urban population and less than 30 percent of the rural population had sustainable access to clean water.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) stated the Citarum River Basin Territory supported a population of 28 million people, produced 20 percent of Indonesia’s gross domestic product and provided 80 percent of the surface water supply to the capital.

Director of the National Development Planning Agency’s directorate of water resources and irrigation, M. Donny Azdan, said the river, which flows 300 km from Mount Gunung Wayang in West Java to the Pantai Bahagia coast in Bekasi, faces a multitude of problems, which the country is trying to tackle.

“The problem upstream is erosion due to agriculture, which dumps a lot of soil into the river. [Further downstream] there’s also the contamination by farm, domestic and industrial waste that is dumped into the river,” he said.

The Majalaya area in West Java, for example, is home to many textile industries that pollute the river, he said during a river expedition Saturday.

The two-day expedition was set up by the Association of Jungle Explorers and Mountain Climbers (Wanadri).

The Citarum was once a familiar training and exploration area for the association, which conducted its first expedition there in 1985, Abrar Prasodjo, the head of the expedition, said.

“The river is necessary for our purposes. We wanted to conduct a training session in Saguling [West Java] but the water was foamy,” he recalled.

Abrar said the expedition was expected to provide new information that would be relayed to the authorities and the community who would take the necessary steps to improve the state of the river, thus allowing the association’s members and the residents to benefit from Citarum’s water.

One man’s garbage: A man wades in the Citarum River in the Majalaya area, West Java next to a garbage pile on the riverbank. The water is heavily contaminated by untreated waste from textile plants. Courtesy of Cita-Citarum/Steve Griffiths

The heavy pollution of the river is also evident in its estuary in Muara Gembong, Bekasi.

An area in Muara Gembong, ironically named Pantai Bahagia (Happy Beach), constantly suffers from tidal and other floods. The coastline, once thick with mangroves, is now the site of a fishing village where wooden boats have to navigate through a layer of rubbish.

“Its as if the ground sinks lower by 10 centimeters each year,” Erik, a resident, said of the increasingly serious floods.

Carsim, another resident who was in an elevated sitting space to avoid coming in contact with the dirty water, said around 20 years ago, the area had not been as crowded as it was now and the mangrove forest dominated the landscape.

Abrar said the constant destruction of the mangrove forest also endangered the area’s ecosystem.

“There used to be a lot of birds and monkeys here, but now the mangrove is very thin,” he said as the expedition team navigated the river.

Donny said the road to restore, or at least improve, the Citarum River was a long and rocky one.

“We calculate there are around 80 separate actions that need to be taken, which will take around 15 to 20 years to do. The cost would be around Rp 35 trillion, [US$3.7 billion]” he said.

Given this estimate and the fact that the country has over 5,000 rivers with eleven of them critically polluted, would fulfilling the MDG for clean water be realistic?

“No,” he said, laughing. “We’re having problems with just one river!” (dis)