Flood-monitoring website launched
Dewanti A. Wardhani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Jakarta | Wed, December 03 2014, 11:15 AM
In cooperation with an Australian university and Twitter, the city administration launched petajakarta.org at City Hall in Central Jakarta on Tuesday.
The new site, developed with the University of Wollongong’s Smart Infrastructure Facility, is a crowd-sourcing website in which Twitter users can share real-time information with others on flooding in the city.
The website can be accessed freely by all Internet users. In cooperation with the Jakarta Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPBD), the website will show a map showing which parts of the city are flooding.
The website is a project developed in cooperation with the University of Wollongong, headed by researchers Etienne Turpin and Thomas Holderness.
Turpin, during his opening speech at the launch, said Jakarta was the city with the highest number of Twitter users and tweets.
In the last two rainy seasons, he said, over 80 million users in Jakarta had tweeted the word “banjir” (flood).
“The challenge is how we use this information [on Twitter] for the people and the government [...] Therefore, we created a free open source website where anyone can report flooding in real time,” Turpin said.
To inform others on flooding, he said, a user should tweet @petajkt with the keyword “banjir” and mention the location and intensity of flooding, uploading a picture if possible.
“The map on petajakarta.org will be updated based on the tweets we receive. It’s now your civic responsibility to report flooding to each other and the government through Twitter,” Turpin said.
He went on that the city administration would not need to increase the number of flood sensors, as people and their smartphones were the best sensors the city could get.
“One brilliant sensor is the human being. They can use their mobile devices as sensors to create a real time map and help the BPBD to respond. Hopefully this is only the beginning of collaboration between individuals, the city and the industry,” Turpin said.
Separately, BPBD head Bambang Musyawardana said the website would greatly help his agency in responding to floods in the city.
“With this website, we can respond much quicker. We will monitor the website and send help to those who need it as quickly as possible, whether they need to be evacuated, or they need food, or rubber boats, hopefully we can help,” Bambang told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the launch.
Meanwhile, Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama said he fully supported the website, adding that it would ease the city’s workload.