Torrential rain that has been sweeping through the city for several days has resulted in broken dams and rising water levels which incapacitated much of the city on Thursday, leaving 15 dead and nearly 20 thousand homeless and evacuated. For those looking for a centralized information services regarding Jakarta’s floods, the Ushahidi platform provides a way to keep updated on the latest situation and Google has also made its own resource page. There’s also a readiness kit that people can print out and a map of the city’s flooded areas.
Google Crisis Response is an initiative by the company to provide technology solutions to global challenges using Google’s resources, innovations, products, and presence. For this specific instance, Google has set up a collection of resources to deal with Jakarta’s flooding including an interactive map, a phone hotline, SMS center, coordination with the country’s disaster mitigation agency, and more. The page for Jakarta’s flood crisis is here. Google also has provided a resource list in a mobile friendly format.
An independent flood monitoring map has been created by a Google Maps user who goes by the name dest which was initially circulated early on Thursday before Google’s more comprehensive resource page was made known.
Ushahidi is an open source project built to rely on crowd sourced information regarding various events. Originally built as an activism tool during the 2007 Kenyan presidential election, the mapping service has been used for various humanitarian efforts to assist identification and distribution of essential services. Information fed to the service comes from various resources including news reports, SMS, Twitter updates, as well as direct updates to the specific information center via email or phone calls.
KlikJKT is one of the local services using Ushahidi and it was built to monitor everything to do with Jakarta, from public facilities, city ordinances, disasters and emergencies, community movements, and developments, although crime is one aspect that it does not monitor. Regardless, the website allows people to monitor what’s happening in the city and to find out issues that may need to be tackled in creating a more livable city. The more people using this service, the more beneficial it becomes to the city and everyone who is dependent on it.
There are two other Ushahidi projects, made specifically for the flood, namely Bantu Jakarta and OpenIR. Both offer similar services and alerts as the KlikJKT effort with news updates and geolocation-based reports.
A disaster-ready kit has been prepared by Aditya Sani, Jong Djakarta and Muda Madani in the form of a PDF document. The document consists of a list of essential Twitter accounts, some of which also made it into our own list earlier today, a list of things to prepare such as water, instant food, first aid kit, etc., and a list of things to do and avoid.
Prepared in Indonesian, the list is expected to provide enough knowledge for those affected by the floods for them to ensure they have the minimal information required to survive and to contact several emergency services. Those with access to computers and printers are encouraged to print and distribute this document to those who require it.
For more updated information regarding the Jakarta floods, we recommend people to visit the official website of the national disaster mitigation agency (BNPB) as well as the Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction which provides an overview map of the city’s flooded areas based on the data from the Jakarta Regional Disaster Management Office.