Sat about in the Epicentrum having beers and pizzas on Saturday afternoon after crawling through the Saturday afternoon traffic and watching quite in amazement as the sky went from white puffy clouds to a black menacing storm, it began to rain and the wind began to howl and the apartments opposite the mall were lost in the fog of torrential rain for about 2 hours. The rain was so severe that the mall itself was flooded and so we settled in a coffee shop and waited for it to all die down.
And it rained and rained and the wind pushed the rain in to all the corners and the gaps causing more places to leak.
Unbeknown to us the city itself was enduring its worst flooding this year and that was after the big rain we have had all week.
The thing with the rain is that firstly every taxi disappears, then the buses fill up, the rats run out from the drains and then the roads fill, the rivers burst and then everything else grinds to a halt and it did and in a quite spectacular style. Happily I was not affected by any of this as we never went any further into the city than Rasuna and so it rarely floods there and when we got home, the rain had pretty much stopped and the roads were starting to dry up.
Several places in the city were flooded out and by up to 60cm in places, which not only shows how much rain actually fell but how bad and poorly managed the drainage system is here because despite there being many drains and run offs, they run off into waste clogged pipes, rivers or the access points to the drains are clogged with dirt and rubbish preventing the water from moving away. In England they have the same with the rivers after the rain and the floods are blamed on the lack of green space around rivers which is meant to soak the excess water up. Sadly Jakarta has not enough green space to allow water to be soaked up and clearly no-one has thought about how to manage the floods that appear every time it rains in the same places causing the same problems.
This is the information from the Jakarta Post from Saturday:
Heavy rain hit Jakarta on Saturday, inundating the majority of the capital and crippling the traffic all over the city.
Commuters are advised to avoid these inundated spots, as reported by tempo.co:
North Jakarta:
- Kapuk
- Semper
- Pluit Lama
- the 23-kilometer point of the Tanjung Priok toll road to Soekarno-Hatta International Airport
Central Jakarta:
- Hotel Indonesia traffic circle
- Kebon Sirih (50 centimeters)
- In front of the Senayan apartment (60 centimeters)
- In front of Senayan City shopping mall (60 centimeters)
- In front of the Atmajaya University (40 centimeters)
- In front of the BRI Building on Jl. Jend. Sudirman (50 centimeters)
- Around Bank Indonesia on Jl. Thamrin (40-50 centimeters)
South Jakarta:
- In front of ITC Fatmawati shopping mall (40 centimeters)
- Casablanca underpass (30 centimeters)
- In front of Ramayana department store in Ciputat (40 centimeters)
- In front of the Australian Embassy on Jl. Rasuna Said (20 centimeters)
West Jakarta:
- Jl. Kyai Tapa (40 centimeters)
- In front of the Indosiar Building on Jl. Daan Mogot (30 centimeters)
- In front of Citraland shopping mall on Jl. S. Parman (40 centimeters)
- In front of the Ibis Hotel (20 centimeters)
- In front of the Menara Peninsula Hotel in Slipi (25 centimeters)
- Pesing (20 centimeters)
Interestingly enough most of the major flooding occurs in high volume traffic spot, outside malls or near to rivers.... but I can't say why that would be I leave that to those that have more knowledge than me about these things.
And here are some photos from the rain
Pluit area
Somewhere near Monas
Thamrin - Sarinah Mall
I have no idea how he got there or where got his special underwater bike from
There is more rain forecast and if it rains like that up in the hills and mountains of Bogor then the city will be a bigger mess for longer thats for sure.
The links
