Mourning for Situ Gintung

Situ Gintung is a name for a dam in Cirendeu, Tangerang. Can you imagine that you are going to witness tsunami in the middle of a city? The leaking dam made it possible... Multa Fidrus wrote for the Jakarta Post "Cireundeu 'tsunami'! Earlier warnings were ignored".

An already soggy Friday morning was quickly soaked in tears as the nation awoke to the horror of an inland tsunami that struck poor and affluent alike in the Cireundeu area, South Tangerang.

As the sun broke through the clouds to shed light on the tragedy, emergency crews raced to rescue survivors and shelter those turned out of their homes by a wall of water gushing madly from a collapsed sluice gate at the 21-hectare Situ Gintung Lake.

In a nation fraught with a seemingly endless onslaught of disasters, updates throughout the day were eerily familiar as the body count mounted.

The disaster should not be blame to the natural cause alone, as JP stated "But this latest disaster may have not been all nature's work alone. The foreboding signs were already there, according to some."

It was recorded by that article that earlier warning as from 2007 was actually ignored by the government,

They, like many others watching in horror, wondered how Jakarta's worst single-day tragedy since the 1987 Bintaro train crash, which killed 139, could have happened.

Recriminations soon boiled over as residents claimed they had long been concerned with the condition of the sluice gate, which was already rotting in parts and had not functioned properly for two years.

"We first found leaks at the sluice gate in early 2007; we reported it to Pak Naseh, an official at the Tangerang regency Irrigation Agency, who daily controls the lake," said RT 1 resident Taufik.

However, no response was forthcoming.

Through a river and lake normalization program last year, the government built an embankment jogging track on the lake's eastern shore, while the feeble sluice gate to the north was ignored.

I've heard that the foundation's system of most dam or lake enhancement is using sand or soil to fill in the base of its pile planking...and most "Situ" or "Lake" here were made in that way of construction. Then we need to be very cautious about those leaking.

It was so sad seeing how many people loosing their beloved family. In the television we can see a man loosing his four children, all were covered in front of him...they were found dead. His wife is still missing. We've got around one hundred people dead, while around 105 people are still missing. I hope the souls are resting in peace...and the family left here can be tough enough to face the future. God bless them...