The Manggarai Gate: Garbage (part 2/2)

[There is another post with our interviews of people living along this river]

When I started searching the web for "strange rivers", I'd frequently find photos of the "dirtiest river in the world" in Jakarta, Indonesia, like such:

Honestly, there's a river underneath all that (source)

I imagined that something like that could only happen if a flooding river eroded the banks and carried away part of a garbage dump (I have seen it happen in Arizona, but that was not nearly as bad as the above).  When I asked what "the dirtiest place" on "the dirtiest river" was, a common item on peoples' lists seemed to be Manggarai.

When we walked over a bridge at another site earlier in the day we started to get a feel for what goes into the river. A girder below the bridge had various bits of trash on it. This was above the high water mark, so it either arrived on a stiff breeze or was tossed there by a passerby. At a places like this you have to shout to be heard over the cars and motorbikes.

Any of the pictures in this post you can click to get a closer look

Most of the trash is either plastic bags, styrofoam food containers or just unrecognizable yuck. Occasionally something catches the eye and makes the imagination reel. For example, I must wonder who is passing over a bridge (with no sidewalk) and decides to jettison three cooked sets of ramen noodles over the edge? And with such outward force that it lands on the girder 4 meters away?

Here's a close up of the trash racks at the Manggarai gate, itself

In this view are: A refrigerator without its metal shell (surprisingly many of these around... I don't know where the shells go), yogurt cups, shoes (...every lost shoe has a story...), DVDs, cups, soccer balls, coconuts...

If it weren't so awful, it could be art. 

I was inclined to believe that anything brown and floating was feces. I was not quite sure how all the individual poops were able to find eachother and form a floating mat. The water itself was dark gray. It smelled as bad as it looks. Part barnyard, part burning plastic.. like disease on the wind. Despite all this, the occasional catfish came gulping to the surface.

There are several ways that trash gets out of the river. Every couple days, a private company's crane sloshes through the water and scoops things to up on shore. There is a crane operator on-call by SMS in case the garbage builds up too quickly. Apparently it was pretty tame the day we were there because it is easier to keep up with the cleaning during the dry season. 

The crane (back right in below) drops the trash on the bank, and it is sorted through and/or hauled away. The water draining out the bottom of this pile is a foul broth.

The other way to pull something out of the river is for people to pull it onto bamboo rafts and ferry it to shore. There are many of these elsewhere along the rivers. Here's an example: 

If you look close in the below, you can see an inflatable Spongebob Squarepants (...every lost inflatable Spongebob Squarepants has a story...)

There's the occasional Rocking Horse...

Our guides said that some of the below wood was from flooded homes. It was recovered and would be resold for firewood for those too poor to afford cooking gas or kerosene.

There were mattresses pulled from the river:

We had some discussion about if they, too, would be resold. The guides thought that likely yes for things like shoes, but probably no for mattresses. I was haunted by the idea of someone (perhaps unknowingly?) buying a mattress pulled from the dirtiest river in the world... but some googling confirms that the company operating the crane considers mattresses non-recyclable.

We climbed to the top of a nearby second gate and looked upstream at the river houses. Actually these are more like apartment complexes than individual houses...

At the back of most houses there is a platform that serves as a toilet that deposits directly into the river. Over the course of a couple minute conversation we saw several people use the latrines (indeed, at one point both latrines in view were seeing action simultaneously).

One of the local people with us suggested that there is a culture of throwing trash out the back of houses in Indonesia. No one sees the river from the street, so it is out of sight, out of mind. Maybe we should turn the houses around and put the road by the river instead. As he said this, a lady came out on the platform and threw a plastic bag full of garbage over the railing and into the water. A plastic tub floated by.

Every lost plastic tub has a story...

The Manggarai Gate: Operations and data (part 1/2)

Behold! The Manggarai gate, the valve to the heart of Jakarta: 

Human on the right, for scale

How open or closed it is determines if the Presidential Palace is flooded. It is also one of the dirtiest places in the city, where trash is fished out of the river by the crane-full daily.

25 km upstream of the Manggarai gate is Depok and 25 km upstream of that is Bogor. Just outside Bogor is the Observer at Katulampa Dam, discussed in previous posts. Floods passing by Katulampa arrive at Manggarai half a day later and it is the observer's job to warn the people of Jakarta.

Having only 2 million people makes Depok something of a suburb to Jakarta's 10 million. To drive between Depok and Jakarta takes somewhere between a half hour to 28 days, depending on Jakarta's legendary traffic. No doubt, with 1 million people, Bogor is nothing to sniff at either... Bogor's population density is the second highest in the world, nine times as dense as San Francisco. Only Manila is greater as cities go.

Like Katulampa, Manggarai has been around for many years, built by the Dutch before the 1920s. On the wall of the office is a picture of the river from the 1930s:

We got a briefing of the emergency procedures that were triggered by various flow levels, similar to (and indeed related to the operations of) Katulampa Dam.

The site saw action in 2007 when the river rose out of its banks to flood part of the control house and the surrounding neighborhood. The high water level left a black stain on some of the buildings and poles around the site and these were labeled (on February 4, 2007, the water level was 1090 centimeters above the reference level, reading "+1090 4-02-07").

Every 15 minutes the employees check the river level and adjust the gate if necessary. During floods, the CB radio and phone ring off the hook. The operator that guided us around, Dian Nur Cahyono, said that one of the tougher parts of his jobs is when local people call or come to the site to argue about how the gate is being operated, sacrificing their neighborhoods to save some others... especially when that "some others" includes the Presidential Palace and relatively upscale neighborhoods. There is no point arguing with the operator, however, it is all Standard Operating Procedure that is ultimately controlled (and can be overridden) by the Governor.

Dian Nur Cahyono in the upstairs control room

When we asked the operator how he ended up here, he said that he was working in air conditioning and that the local government advertised a job for an expert electrical technician. Before getting the job, he did not fully know what it was about, but now that he works there, he felt pride in doing a public service.

Outside was a rain gauge belonging to BMKG, something like the Indonesian National Weather Service. A palm frond had grown over the gauge likely causing a steady drift in the quality of the measurements.

The operators half-joked that they were afraid to maintain the site; a sign warned that entering the enclosure was a crime endangering the public safety that carried a penalty of 12 years imprisonment. Figuring that I was leaving the country soon, I broke the law by doing some pruning. We'll see if I get extradited.

Sticking it to The Man, climate-data-quality-style. 

I pity the researcher that is going to discover a sudden shift in the time series record (on 9 September 2011, in case you're reading this, researcher from the future). 

Manual raingage in foreground, automatic gauge inside the fence.

At this site, floods only happen a couple times in one's career, but trash is a daily problem. The trash at Manggarai deserves its own post, so that's just what we'll do (tomorrow!).

Guest post: Tom Perkins about Dallas Reigle

While I was a forecaster at the Natural Resources Conservation Service I was trained by Tom Perkins. He was a forecaster when I met him, then he became head forecaster and is now leader of the branch. Earlier this month I wrote some stories about Dallas Reigle, the first forecaster I ever met. Tom worked with Dallas for many years and I asked if he had any other stories about him. Tom Perkins wrote:

"I met Dallas in 1984, just after I transferred to the SCS (Soil Conservation Service) Snow Survey Program from the NWRFC (Northwest River Forecast Center), where I was also a forecaster (seasonal and flood)...Dallas was then a junior forecaster, just like me. Dallas is one of those guys that, when you first meet him, becomes the brother you never had. What a great guy! And a great hydrologist. He invited me to his home on almost every one of my visits to Phoenix. He also arranged several Salt River Project helicopter flights over the Salt, Verde, and Tonto watersheds.

Most years, Dallas and I would coordinate [discuss and agree on] our forecasts and see how low we could go. Dallas would say, "This is the desert...forecast dry, Perkins!". Then there were the major floods of 1993. Dallas and I were forecasting 600% of median for the Salt and Verde rivers in January; twice that for Tonto Creek! We were pointing in the right direction, but we did not go far enough! I think the Salt ran 16,000% of median that year (Jan-May), or some other eye-popping number [Ed: The Tonto River January flow was 4,500% of normal median flow]. Cars, washing machine, refrigerators, all kinds of junk were bobbing in the Salt River as it ran into, through, and out of Phoenix. I'm sure that many of those appliances ended up in Painted Rock Reservoir, near Gila Bend (90 miles/150 km away). That was a year to remember, just like 2011 will be a year to remember for the Missouri...but, that's another story.

Dallas with a snowed-in snotel site. The brown box is an instrument shelter buried in snow.  The shelter is probably about 9 feet/3 meters tall. 

Dallas liked to smoke cigars. They were big, fat stogies, like coach Red Auerbach used to light up when the Boston Celtics basketball team were winning. The day that I took the pic at Snowslide Canyon was the last time I saw Dallas. He contracted Lou Gehrig's disease soon after and I never got back to Phoenix before he passed away. 

Red Auerbach on a winning streak (source)

We communicated via email until almost the very last. He started to lose his functions, but was able to send messages, using a special computer that he could command from his wheelchair. Dallas was both bright and witty. I remember sending him an email one day, asking him what his favorite cigars were. I told him that I would send him a box. He emailed back, telling me not to send any; the doctor told him that they were bad for his health. I laughed. I laughed a lot when I was around Dallas. I miss our conversations.

I have met many "personalities" like Dallas, during my 37+ years with the Federal government. A lot of people associated with the Snow Survey Program were born about 100 years too late. Many of them would have made great mountain men! Most of them loved being out in the mountains and the snow, and would put in many more hours than they were paid for. Randy Julander (Utah Snow Survey Supervisor) once remarked about snow survey work "...And we get paid for this?"

The observer at the Ciliwung gate (part 2/2)

He offered a tour of the dam. By this time, the laundry had been removed from the raingage. On closer inspection, it turns out there’s three raingages practically within arm’s reach of eachother. Two agencies transmit their own automated measurements. It’s easier to have two different gages than to try and get the two agencies to share the same data. There’s also a non-automated gage that is read manually.

“How different are the measurements?” Surprisingly different.

“Which one is the best, most accurate?” The manual one, of course.

The streamgage upstream of the dam had manual and automated sensors too. The largest lizard I’ve seen on this trip so far skittled out of the electronics box at the streamgage. Nearby, someone had built a personal levee out into the channel and they were digging out smooth river stones for sale.

Inside the streamgage shelter

By this time we started to catch the attention of the local kids (streamgage in background)

The kids later showed off by diving off the dam

We stopped to talk with two old men who lived on the waterfront and asked their experience with the river. I expected him to show where the river came up to his knees during the flood but instead he pointed to marks on the ceiling. He made a point to say that the closing of the irrigation canal during the flood caused water to back up into his house, making things worse for him, even if it helped those downstream.

Splash marks on the ceiling

Even though the old man's house had been flooded repeatedly, he was appreciative of the information and warning he got from Mr Andi. Even though it's easy to view government representatives as the foe, the dam and its observer seemed like a community pillar. 

For being an "observer", he seemed to play the game on his toes and not his heels. He said there were volunteer cleanups of the river by the community. People came out of their homes to greet us. Someone on a motorbike (literally) high-fived Mr Andi as he passed. As we were saying goodbyes, there was mention of how he recently got an award for his service. 

Here's to hoping that he gets to do more observing than operating in the future 

(source)

The observer at the Ciliwung Gate (Part 1/2)

Along the road to Katulampa dam, the canal was frothing from the splashing of swimming children. A small peanut of a girl ran full-throttle along-side our van while young boys dove into the water. When we arrived at the dam, fresh laundry was hanging on the wire fence around the raingage. 

The irrigation canal at Katulampa. Raingage on the right. 

Boys playing on the gates to the natural channel.

This place is just south of Bogor, about 50 km south of Jakarta. Whatever happens on this spot on the Ciliwung River happens in Jakarta about half a day later and so it is the most important site for Flood Early Warning in the city.

Katulampa Dam itself, built in 1911, is small and does not hold much water. Mostly it splits the Ciliwung River in two; the canal irrigates fields and there is a natural channel for use in times of high flow. The dam has a series of gates that can be raised or lowered to control the flow. It serves as a bridge from one side of the community to the other, wide enough for foot traffic and motorbikes. You can also buy gas there, hand-poured with a funnel from plastic water bottles.

The Katulampa gas station

Andi Sudirman (“Mr Andi”) is the station’s full-time operator and lives with his family two doors down from the dam (his morning commute is 50 feet long). His title ("Penjaga") translates into Guard or Keeper. He operates the gate but also maintains a nearby streamgage, the raingages, and other monitoring equipment. Several cameras transmit images of the water level. His workspace is neat and tidy. The office is mostly empty except for a backup power setup, emergency lights, cb radios, red sirens, log books, a video screen on the wall, cushions for sleeping on the floor,  a couch, ashtray and so on. Everything around the site looks like it just got a fresh coat of paint. 

Mr Andi's desk

Mr Andi has a certain sense of style we had not seen often in Indonesia. The usual dress code for men is a white collared business shirt and slacks. He is trim and athletic. His sleek metal-framed glasses reminded me of those worn by Australian politicians… but his electric blue jersey and silver watch gave him a bit of hip-hop coolness. Add a diamond earring and a microphone and I think he could have the look of an Indonesian R and B singer.

Mr Andi, the Ciliwung Gate observer

Mr Andi’s station has a set of flood levels (stages) that trigger events downstream. When the water at the gate reaches 80 cm (2.5 feet) deep, Mr Andi makes a call to downstream water managers and local government and he keeps them up to date on if the river is rising or falling. Above 150 cm (5 feet), eyebrows really start rising and preparations go into the more urgent "yellow zone" stage. Above 200 cm (6.5 feet) is the “red zone” where downstream evacuations are necessary.

Stages 1-4 marked on the side of the gate

This is monitored by camera

...and is transmitted to the office and downstream.

We had heard earlier in the day about the recent major floods in 2007 and asked about them. Funny enough, right behind us there’s a poster on the wall showing a time series chart of river levels during February 2007. This site went from 40 cm (1.3 feet) up to 250 cm (8.2 feet) in about 6 hours. This was because bucket-loads of rain had fallen upstream. 

The poster of the 2007 flood. Time runs from left to right. The bottom line is the flood level at this site and the top line is the flood level downstream in Jakarta. 

The bottom half of the poster had a series of repeat photos of various spots on the river at different flow rates, from placid calm to babbling brook and through to roiling pandemonium.

About how things looked the day we were there (source)

Progressively heavier runoff (source)

Even heavier still (source)

Reaching deep into my arsenal of penetrating questions, I asked “So… um… what was that like?” Our translator (Heru Yoko from the Research and Development Center of Water Resources) explained that the Standard Operating Procedure was to open the floodgates as far as they could go. The irrigation canal was also closed. Houses washed away and there were mud slides. 

Consider this, though; in the 6 hours it took to go from business as usual to “Lord Almighty!” at the dam, the river was still flat in Jakarta. It’s the travel time between the sites that allows them to make a good forecast of what’s going to happen downstream. In military terms, 2007 must have been like a tiny outpost sending a wire to Berlin that a massive Allied invasion force had just landed at Normandy.

When I asked about if Mr Andi was worried about raising a false alarm, it must have translated as if he was worried about an error in the reading or if it was a data spike. No way, he just needed to walk from his office to see the gage. His office (and house for that matter) is right downstream of the dam, between the canal and the channel. The river was thundering by 3 meters (10 feet) from his window. Invasion-wise, we’re not talking the “possible sighting” of a submarine periscope… we’re talking bombers, battleships, marines on the beach, horizon to horizon, the air rumbling.

I pressed but “as a human, what was his experience?” What was he thinking? Was he excited? Afraid? Mr Andi’s response was an animated two minutes in Indonesian that translated roughly into “Really afraid. This whole thing was built 100 years ago. He gets worried for his safety when the river gets above 1 meter. In 2007, it didn’t have time to get to 1 meter, it just soared on up to 2 meters”.

He wouldn’t consider abandoning his post though. This is basically his job, his responsibility, to sit through months, years of tedium so that he could be here to operate the weir during those 6 hours when everything goes crazy. 

(part 2 to follow)

The world's biggest morning glory

"The grass is one of our sensors" said Andrijanto, one of the managers of Jatiluhur dam. It is the third in a series of large dams storing part of the water supply of Jakarta. Nearby a herd of goats walked on the sloped face of the dam, far enough away that we could not hear the bells around their necks. Apparently, when the dam face starts leaking, the grass turns green and this is a low cost way of monitoring it. Maybe the goats are a low cost way of maintaining the sensor too.

Goats on the job, left

Jatiluhur also has the largest “morning glory” spillway in the world. It is shaped like a squat vuvuzela so water can flow over the top of it and down into the center.  Three other dams claim to have the largest such spillway (Whiskeytown Lake, Ladybower Reservoir and Monticello Dam, each around 25 meters/80 feet diameter) but Jatiluhur is wider than all of them combined (90 meters/290 feet). 

Walkway to the morning glory

 When asked if he’s been to the bottom of the spillway Andrijanto answers “Of course, of course!” Apparently willingness to go in the spillway is one of the conditions of working there (but not necessarily part of the job interview). Naturally, there have been times that he went to the bottom and co-workers joked that the crane to bring him back up was broken. I do think the original crane attached to the dam was broken, however.

The view down into the spillway. Note metal ladders at top of photo for scale.

The overhead view of the spillway from space on google maps

Group photo of water managers (in blue uniforms, Andrijanto is 3rd from the left) and researchers from Pusair. 

A few times during the tour of the grounds, Andrijanto touched on a theme of “The most important thing in water management is discipline.” Discipline to do routine maintenance. Discipline to stick to the plan, even during crisis. Discipline to have a plan. “Obey the rules, have discipline”.

It is something of a contradiction because every couple minutes he was eager to demonstrate some innovative feature they had implemented. There is only one Jatiluhur dam and it probably does not have a user guide (or rather the manual is likely 10 binders large... turn to page 2,968 for “what to do if goat falls in spillway”). They need practical creative solutions to one-of-a-kind problems. It seemed like when they ran out of ideas they asked the sage engineer who has worked there longer than I have been alive (next year he gets his 50-year pin). 

As we walked down the tunnel inside the dam to the base of the spillway (photos not allowed), the air gets hot and dank like the bottom of a mine. The air conditioner was not working that day. The tunnel openned to a flourescent lit cavern with turbines and control panels. Everything was cement and metal so there is nowhere for the sound to go as the turbines whir away. Some of the large machines were being field dressed, every part laid out orderly on a blanket.

Into the tunnel

It sounds like Andrijanto has thought about the dam day and night for the 10 years he has worked there. He is paid to worry... worry effectively. There is no room for self-deception. My impression is that his biggest fear is that some day something will go wrong with the dam and a pitchfork and torch-yielding angry mob will come and carry him away.

Problems do happen. Just two weeks ago a small spillway at Buaran Dam failed on one of the delivery canals far downstream. A bank gave away, causing water to flow back into Buaran River, cutting off water supply to the Pejompongan water treatment plant in Central Jakarta. Nearly 1 million customers were affected for days. They say it was a combination of a “natural disaster” and a lack of maintenance.

Andrijanto’s impression of forecasts? Before the largest flood in recent history, the climate forecasters were saying it was going to be dry, so the operators tried not to draw the reservoir down too much. In essence, they were told to zig and the climate zagged. Maybe this was climate change they thought.

What is a water manager to do in that situation? “We cannot reject the decision of the forecasting agency, they have the authority to make the forecasts” It is not the water manager’s place to second guess the forecasters. The forecasters are experts, that is their job. “They have the equipment to make the forecasts, not us”. Of course, like the US and Australia, the forecasters get feedback and suggestions from the water managers, such has how there might have been recent errors.

At this point, Andrijanto turned the tables and asked “Do you think that we have to review our models for climate forecasting in the future?” In essence, what do I think of climate change? Remember, the recurring theme to this point was to make a plan and stick to the plan... but make a new plan if it is clear that something else is needed. Do they need a new plan?

First, I do not know enough of the technical details about Indonesia’s systems to make any conclusions. Also, changes in predictability 1-3 months ahead is a subtly different issue than if the climate itself is trending or becoming more variable. But I said that, at least overseas, it is clear that the climate is changing and it is going to change in the future. Of course the models are wrong and are not going to work as well in the future. How things will change though is uncertain, so I cannot suggest a better plan than what they already have. It is like “the road is due for a curve, we just do not know if they should start turning left or right... Be prepared for a turn however”. Spoken like a true academic I suppose!

Control building with Mr Heru

We asked the senior engineer if he had any reflections after 49 years? He said that building the dam 1 meter higher would make it capable of handling the Probable Maximum Flood (basically the largest conceivable flood, the total worst case scenario). In the meantime, I suppose everyone has to expect the unexpected and hope that the angry mobs and goats keep at bay.

Interview with a NWS river forecaster

This webpage from the US National Weather Service has an interesting interview with one of their river forecasters. It gives a profile of what Andrea Holz does as a forecaster, how she became a forecaster, what some of the challenges of the job are, etc. It's recommended reading, I hope to do profiles like that for other forecasters.

Andrea Holz, forecaster featured in this profile. 

Hydrologic oddities: Linow lake

Lake Linow in Tomohon, North Sulawesi, Indonesia slowly changes color from red to green to blue every now and then. This is because there are sulfuric vents that change the mix of gases in the water. The shallows bubble and let off white smoke.

Here's a satellite image of the lake from Google Earth (in the green phase)

And some others from the ground...

(source)

White waters in foreground (source)

(source)