Several Social Factors Contributing to Floods and Characteristics of the January 2013 Flood in Jakarta, Indonesia

Abstract

 On January 15,2013, heavy monsoon rains resulted in severe flooding in Jakarta city, West Java, Indonesia, which had resulted in 40 deaths, 45,000 refugees, and terrible economic damage. Jakarta city has experienced severe floods in 1996, 2002, 2007, 2013 and 2014. Such extreme flooding events might become more frequent in the future due to the impacts of land use change (urbanization) in the upstream region and climate change. Thus, it is important to understand the characteristics and mechanism of the 2013 Jakarta flood to prepare for the next flood disaster. In this paper, characteristics and several social factors contributing to the 2013 Jakarta flood were described, and a physically-based distributed rainfall-runoff inundation model was applied to the Ciliwung River basin in order to simulate the 2013 January flood in Jakarta. Simulation results matched reasonably well with the observed data, and it was found that the flood inundation occurred at the river section with the shortage of capacity flow in the lower part of the Chiliwung River.