[faint car honks]
[music]
>>Sedlar: So right now we're standing on the the North Jakarta seawall, on my right hand
side is the Java Sea and on my left hand side, about two meters lower, is North
Jakarta, is the land of Jakarta. This part of Jakarta has subsided, has sunk so
much, that if I stand on the other side of the seawall, I'm exactly 2 meters tall,
I'm eye level with the boats, the hulls of the boat on this other side.
[high pitched sound]
If this sea wall were to break, and it's already leaking in a few spots,
about 40% of Jakarta would be flooded to a depth of 1 or 2 meters. It's it's quite
a precarious situation.
In 15 years, 80% of Jakarta's northern part will lie below sea level.
The ground is sinking because there's so much ground water
being pumped up by individuals, by industries, by malls, by developments.
What's happened in Jakarta because of the strong water extraction is that the
rivers don't drain don't flow downhill anymore and basically have to be pumped
over a seawall to drain.
>>Narrator: 51 people in the greater Jakarta area died in floods in
2013 alone. Water caused 3.3 billion dollars worth of damage that year. Severe
flooding has become an annual ordeal in Jakarta.
Rising water leaves citizens
struggling for their lives.
>>Sedlar: There is very little information available for the
public and even in some cases the government about the flooding, on where's
the flooding in Jakarta at this moment, what road I can take home that won't be
flooded, this very basic information about flooding doesn't exist.
So this is the void that PETA Jakarta system is attempting to fill.
>> Turpin:What we basically do is say there's already an incredible social network in
the city, that's live and active and the people are using.
When we have an
emergency situation, in our case flooding, we can convert that Network into an
information gathering and dissemination system by simply running it through a
different software >>Narrator: PETAJakarta.org was created by two
researchers at a university in Australia Thomas Holderness and Etienne Turpin.
It provides a real-time map of flooded streets based on social media reports.
>>Turpin: There's between ten and seventy centimeters of water standing flood
water in these neighborhoods so this is real-time flood information on the
behalf of the citizens and the governments being shared with everyone
this is quite exciting we listened to Twitter for conversations about flooding
and then we send an automatic invitation to people talking about flooding to
share that information with others. At the peak of the floods, hundreds of
thousands of tweets populate the map. While Jakarta doesn't solve the
fact that it will flood in Jakarta during the monsoon it addresses the
secondary fundamental problem of information. During an emergency
situation, the number one resource is information. By disseminating that
information in a non trivial and real-time format both the Emergency
Management Agency and the residents of Jakarta can make better decisions, reduce
risk, and the collective behavior of that across the city as a tremendous impact
that I don't even know any infrastructure engineering could achieve
in the traditional sense.
What's happening in Jakarta is kind of leading
the charge as far as other cities being affected by climate change, so it's only
a matter of time before there's numerous US cities particularly the U.S. coastal
cities such as New York or Boston or San Francisco that will be experiencing
similar issues of very severe flooding in a very large urban environment.
>>Narrator: When that happens the lessons and technology developed in Jakarta may be crucial for
survival for urban dwellers around the world.