Refelksi : Hujan sudah sejak dari zaman bahula, jadi paling tidak suadah harus sadar akan adanya kemungkinan terjadi bencana, dan untuk itu diperlukan perhatian khusus, paling tidak tiap tahun harus diperiksa untuk dilakukan perbaikan sesuai dengan keadaan, tetapi kalau lalai bisa mudah terjadi bencana. Kejadian ini menunjukkan ketidakbecusan penguasa daerah maupun yang duduk di kursi-kursi tinggi NKRI. Bencana dam ini terjadi di sekitar Jakarta, ibu kota pusat kekuasaan NKRI. Kalau disekitar ibu kota saja tidak mampu diperhatikan, bagaimana dengan yang yauh dari mata pusat tachta kekuasaan?
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2009/03/200932771728163921.html Friday, March 27, 2009 15:29 Mecca time, 12:29 GMT Indonesia dam collapse kills dozens The dam collapsed on Friday morning when many local residents were asleep [Reuters] At least 50 people have drowned after a lake burst through a dam, sending a wall of water into a neighbourhood outside Jakarta, the Indonesian capital. The collapse of the dam on Friday morning left more than a dozen people missing and hundreds of homes submerged. Officials say they expect the death toll to rise. It is not clear what caused the dam to burst, but an official said the Situ Gintung lake behind the dam became overloaded after four hours of heavy rain. "The dam was very old, up to a hundred years old, and people are saying maybe the construction was at fault here," Hywel Davies, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Tangerang, 20km west of Jakarta, said. Heavy rain Rustam Pakaya, head of the health ministry crisis centre, said that the flash flood submerged around 400 houses in water up to two metres deep in some places, following hours of heavy rain. IN VIDEO Indonesia's deadly dam burst More Videos... "It rained very heavily for several hours yesterday. The lake overloaded with water and the dam broke," he said. "Right now residents are being evacuated. About half of them are still on rooftops waiting for help." The dam was holding about two million cubic metres of water on the Pesanggrahan river. Al Jazeera's Davies said the waters had begun to recede but thick mud was hampering rescue teams. "Very intensive rescue efforts are going on here ... but the conditions are very difficult. People are walking through neck-high mud, it is incredibly hard to find people," he said. "The conditions here are so treacherous, the water so high in places and it is so hard to get a footing, that the death toll is bound to rise almost certainly." Rescue officials say they fear the death toll could rise much further because the dam collapsed when many people were asleep. 'Mini-tsunami' Some residents said it felt like they had been hit by a "mini-tsunami". "It was like being in the middle of a tsunami," Minu, a local resident told Detikcom, a news website. "People were screaming 'the water's coming in, the water's coming in,' and our dog was barking. I could hear our door being pounded on and I wondered who could it be, but it was the water." Thick mud is hampering rescue teams as waters begin to recede [Reuters] Some people living near the dam said they heard sirens before the disaster occurred, others were caught completely off guard. An investigation will be carried out to learn what caused the disaster. But Wahyu Hartono, a former official at the ministry of public works, said the 10 metre high dam has been poorly maintained in recent years because of budget shortfalls. "We need to find a way to take better care of these Dutch-era dams and dikes,'' he said. "Otherwise, there will be more problems like this in the future.'' Floods and landslides are common in Indonesia during the wet season, which falls around the northern hemisphere's summer. In 2007, floods in the capital left more than 50 people dead. Critics said overdevelopment, poor city planning and clogged drainage canals were partly to blame. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
