Hospitals in Jakarta crowded with flood victims

Jakarta, Feb 13: Hospitals in the Indonesian capital were overwhelmed today with hundreds of flood victims suffering from water-borne diseases after the city's worst flooding in five years.

Some 200,000 people have suffered from flood-related illnesses and there are fears that disease could spread with hundreds of people still displaced from their homes and thousands living in homes with no clean water or plumbing.

''Some hospitals in charge of taking care of flood victims were overloaded. They asked the health ministry to send more medical personnel,'' Suprawoto, spokesman of the National Coordinating Agency for Disaster Management, told Reuters.

''There are 757 in patients, most of them are suffering from diarrhoea, skin diseases, dengue, leptospirosis and severe respiratory problems.'' The patients are in some 20 hospitals in the city.

As hospitals struggled to cope, authorities were busy clearing the streets of garbage while survivors cleared their homes of debris and mud left behind by the receding waters which in some neighbourhoods had been up to several metres deep.

Light showers fell in the city after relatively dry weather the past two days. Indonesia's rainy season has several weeks to run and could bring fresh downpours.

At the peak of the flooding caused by more than a week of rains in Jakarta and surrounding areas, which eased off last Friday officials reported over 400,000 people were displaced.

The number is now down to around 2,300 in Jakarta, a city of 9 million people. Another five million people live in the sprawling suburban districts around the capital.

''Displaced people are now only in three areas. People from South, West and Central Jakarta have returned to their homes.

However, communal kitchens are still running,'' said Suprawoto.

The Indonesian Red Cross has warned of the danger rotting dead animals posed for spreading disease after the floods that have killed 94 people.

Officials and green groups have blamed excessive construction in Jakarta's water catchment areas for making the floods worse, while a deputy environment minister told Reuters last week that climate change contributed to the problem.

Above low-lying seaside Jakarta are foothills that have lost much of their vegetative cover to construction of weekend homes and golf courses, making it harder for the ground to retain water from the deluges common in the rainy season.

Some economists and government officials have warned of an inflationary spike from the flooding, which also hit some retail and manufacturing operations.

A national planning agency official pegged the losses from the floods at up to 8 trillion rupiah, almost double an earlier estimate, the Jakarta Post reported.

Reuters