![]() ![]() Right: Residents of Pesanggrahan in West Jakarta wait out the 2020 flood on their second floor. The situation is one reason the government of President Joko Widodo announced in 2019 that it would move the nation’s capital away from its largest city, off the crowded island of Java to a new city to be built on Borneo, on land that is now forest. Today a lot of Jakartans live with the constant threat of another trauma like 2007 some areas, less protected even than Muara Baru, live with chronic flooding. He survived after holding on to a door frame. “My father almost died after being swept by the current. “The water reached more than one meter,” she recalls. In Muara Baru, the storm surge collapsed the wall, and the sea flooded Suhemi’s house. Driven by a storm coming off the Java Sea and torrential rains, the floods claimed 80 lives around the city and caused hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. ![]() But just five years later, in 2007, the wall proved no match for the worst floods in Jakarta’s modern history. In 2002, the government built the coastal wall, to give the residents peace of mind and time-a respite from the steady sinking of the land under the city and the steady rising of the sea. But by the 2000s the beach had disappeared, and the sea frequently inundated the neighborhood. ![]() Growing up here in the Muara Baru neighborhood in the 80s and 90s, Suhemi used to play on the beach in front of her house. JakartaApart from the narrow, unpaved road, the two-meter-high concrete coastal wall is the only thing that separates Suhemi’s small restaurant in North Jakarta from the sea. ![]()
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