Hospitals in Jakarta crowded with flood victims

[Pastor Dale Morgan]

*
Perilous Times and Global Warming

Hospitals in Jakarta crowded with flood victims*

13 Feb 2007 04:35:56 GMT
Source: Reuters

JAKARTA, Feb 13 (Reuters) - Hospitals in the Indonesian capital were
overwhelmed on Tuesday with hundreds of flood victims suffering from
water-borne diseases after the city's worst flooding in five years.

Some 200,000 people have suffered from flood-related illnesses and there
are fears that disease could spread with hundreds of people still
displaced from their homes and thousands living in homes with no clean
water or plumbing.

"Some hospitals in charge of taking care of flood victims were
overloaded. They asked the health ministry to send more medical
personnel," Suprawoto, spokesman of the National Coordinating Agency for
Disaster Management, told Reuters.

"There are 757 in patients, most of them are suffering from diarrhoea,
skin diseases, dengue, leptospirosis and severe respiratory problems."
The patients are in some 20 hospitals in the city.

As hospitals struggled to cope, authorities were busy clearing the
streets of garbage while survivors cleared their homes of debris and mud
left behind by the receding waters which in some neighbourhoods had been
up to several metres deep.

Light showers fell in the city after relatively dry weather the past two
days. Indonesia's rainy season has several weeks to run and could bring
fresh downpours.

At the peak of the flooding -- caused by more than a week of rains in
Jakarta and surrounding areas, which eased off last Friday -- officials
reported over 400,000 people were displaced.

The number is now down to around 2,300 in Jakarta, a city of 9 million
people. Another five million people live in the sprawling suburban
districts around the capital.

"Displaced people are now only in three areas. People from South, West
and Central Jakarta have returned to their homes. However, communal
kitchens are still running," said Suprawoto.

The Indonesian Red Cross has warned of the danger rotting dead animals
posed for spreading disease after the floods that have killed 94 people.

Officials and green groups have blamed excessive construction in
Jakarta's water catchment areas for making the floods worse, while a
deputy environment minister told Reuters last week that climate change
contributed to the problem.

Above low-lying seaside Jakarta are foothills that have lost much of
their vegetative cover to construction of weekend homes and golf
courses, making it harder for the ground to retain water from the
deluges common in the rainy season.

Some economists and government officials have warned of an inflationary
spike from the flooding, which also hit some retail and manufacturing
operations.

A national planning agency official pegged the losses from the floods at
up to 8 trillion rupiah ($885 million), almost double an earlier
estimate, the Jakarta Post reported. ($1 = 9,041 rupiah)