The sun had yet to rise but 37-year-old Jundi, with a broom in his hand,
sat in an empty Transjakarta busway lane on Jl. MH Thamrin in Central
Jakarta, at 4 a.m. on Tuesday. Sweat soaked his face and his
orange street-cleaning uniform despite the cool early morning
temperature, as he tried to catch up with the Sanitation Agency’s
garbage truck. His work mates, sweeping up garbage after the New
Year’s Eve carnival from the National Monument (Monas) on Jl. Medan
Merdeka Selatan to the Atma Jaya University on Jl. Sudirman, had fallen
behind the garbage truck that led the cleaning troupe.
“I’ve been
cleaning up these streets every New Year since 1999, never was this
grubby,” said Jundi as he struggled to catch his breath. The city
administration closed the streets to motorists to give way to the
carnival and its 16 makeshift stages along the route, to launch the
first ever car-free New Year’s Eve street festival and to centralize
celebrations to limit traffic congestion during the night. Around
200,000 Jakartans flocked to the city’s main thoroughfares, according
to Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Rikwanto, to ring in the New Year.
These crowds attracted street vendors, whom Jundi and other street
cleaners blamed for the piles of garbage. “I’ve never seen as much trash
at Monas and at the Bundaran HI [Hotel Indonesia Traffic Circle] after a
New Year’s Eve celebration as I saw today, and we are overwhelmed in
cleaning it all up. I guess it was because there were many people and
activities during the night and because they allowed street vendors to
operate during the festival,” said 42-year-old street cleaner Amid. Sanitation
Agency chief Unu Nurdin estimated that the capital produced around
7,245 tons of garbage after New Year’s Eve celebration, most of which
was concentrated along the main traffic arteries.
The capital produced
around 6,700 tons garbage during last year’s celebrations. Unu
said 330 of the 757 workers the agency rallied to clean the roads after
the festivities would be deployed along the car-free route, which was
recently inundated by traffic-stopping floods after torrential rains and
clogged gutters. The agency also dispatched 22 trucks to
transport the garbage to the Bantar Gebang landfill in Bekasi, West
Java, and four street-sweeping machines. Amid said that he and
his cleaning crew had been on standby at Monas since 7 p.m. on New
Year’s Eve and started cleaning up the roads at 2 a.m. once the event
concluded.
“We’ve been told to clean up the streets by 7 a.m.
before more cars hit the road, but I am not sure we can do it. We
usually were done cleaning the street at 5 a.m. in previous new years,
but it’s 4 a.m. and there are still many things to do,” Amid said. Wildy, 47, a sanitation worker from Jakarta’s Parks and Cemeteries Agency, shared Jundi and Amid’s grievances. “Its
not only that there is more garbage than ever, but the wet roads make
it hard for us to clean up the waste and sweep the muddy roads,” Wildy
said while picking up garbage strewn along the sidewalk. Rains soaked
the capital on Monday, beginning at dusk and stopping just before
midnight.
The administration did not only mobilize workers from
the Sanitation Agency to sweep piles of garbage off the main roads, but
also brought in workers from the Parks and Cemeteries Agency to clean up
the sidewalks and green spaces and workers from the Public Works Agency
to clean the sewers. The street cleaners’ travails seem to have paid off. Although
some plastic garbage was still spotted around the Hotel Indonesia
traffic circle at 9 a.m. as evidence of the massive festivity held in
the area at midnight, the mounds of trash that had covered the area only
hours earlier were nowhere to be seen and traffic had returned to
normal.
For their efforts, cleaning crews received high praise from some of the previous night’s guests. “The
street cleaners did a good job. There was trash all over the place when
I left Jl. Sudirman after the midnight fireworks, but when I saw the
street again at 4 a.m., the road was squeaky clean.” Thea Aninditya, 26,
one of the partygoers, said. (aml)
source : the jakarta post
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