Monday, February 05, 2007

Flooded market


It was sunny today, thank heavens, so we went down the street to the Benhill market to check on the flooding there. The water level seemed to be going down, and people were starting to bail out their shops and houses.


More rain is forecast, plus, some parts of the city are much worse off than Benhill, with water too deep to walk through. But hopefully today was a bit of a breather for most of the city.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I read somewhere that 340,000 people in jakarta were displaced by the flooding! do you know if that number is correct (or low/high?)

or what segments of the population/city these displaced people come from?

I know jakarta is a huge city but 340 thousand is still a huge number of people.

it's hard to imagine where they'd all go...

Anonymous said...

Hi Trish!
Please be careful not to walk in the floodwater. Urban floodwater is not good for you.

Trish said...

Yes, we're being careful, it's clearly pretty nasty stuff! The local children swim in it, which is worrisome.

I can't judge the number of people dispaced, but in a city of between 8 and 10 million, with an estimated 70 percent flooded, 340,000 seems like a conservative estimate if anything. There are definitely some wealthy neighborhoods being hit; some upscale developments are being built in the flood plains now because land is expensive or impossible to get elsewhere. But must flood-prone areas are poor, and I suspect the poor are bearing the brunt of it.

Lots of people go to the nearest mosque that's dry. They just pack everybody in on the floor. And people go to their relatives' houses - the woman who cleans for us has three siblings and their families at her house.

Trish said...

I was wrong in my original post, by the way ... there is apparently some very deep flooding in Benhill, maybe back in the little alleys we couldn't get to.