Citarum “The World Dirtiest River”

Citarum river is the longest and largest river in west Java. As the most strategic
river it has an important role in the life of the people of West Java, as it supports
agriculture, water supply, fishery, industry, sewerage, and electricity. It irrigates
400,000 hectares of rice fields and is a source of energy for three hydroelectric
power stations serving three cities. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a good condition
and listed as one of the most polluted rivers in the world by world bank. Citarum
river surface is full of rubbish like bottles, plastic, can, and even a dead animals. This
river is surrounded by villagers and many industries, causing a lot of rubbish and any
kind of toxic chemical dumped by industries and contaminated this river. Each village
has about six thousand inhabitants and they can produce up to ten tonnes rubbish a
day with no waste disposal facilities from the government.

Even though this river is heavily contaminated, more than twenty eight million
people still relies on this river as their main source of water, and using it for daily
activities such as shower, cook, washing, and even drinking. This condition, in fact,
affect the villagers around a lot, many people suffer because of this condition. Start
from a fisherman who cant catch a fish again because the river’s chemicals killed the
living things. Poor quality and the decreasing quantity in farmer’s crops also
happened. Farmers from the community said, under normal circumtances they
would get at least nine tonnes of crops in one hectar land, but since the water
contamination happened, they would only get four tonnes of crops. And the most
common things that happen are disease like skin rashes, hair fall, and scabies that
caused by using this river in daily activites. Even the children would swim and play in
this polluted river even tough the water would harm their skin. On another days
except Sunday, the water would have color like blue, red, green and even black
because of the textile waste that dumped by the industries.

This river’s water contain many toxic compounds like lead, mercury, chromium,
and iron. Lead are highly toxic, lead intoxication would usually make abnormalities in
our central nervous system. Mercury is said to be the most heavy metal in the nature,
chromium are toxic and carcinogenic, chromium often comes from from industrial
work such as protective metal coatings, paint pigments, rubber, cement, paper, and
leather tanning. Iron intoxication can lead to catalyse radical-forming reactions. And
overall people who regularly drink this contaminated water would have a higher risk
of getting cancer, mental retardation, and slow growth especially for a child. More
than sixty percent of the child suffer from impetigo crustosa and at least 3 times a
day people who suffering from this skin disease would come to the clinic. According
to local clinic in the area, skin condition placed 2 of 10 most common disease here.

There are regulations for industries to make water a waste water treatment
plant and to not dump their waste directly onto the river, but they don’t really care
and keep doing it. Only ten percent of the factory along the river put their waste into
water treatment plant. Ironically, there’s a villagers who work in the factory but
can’t do anything about it because they need to keep on living. They said, the factory
often dump their waste in the middle of night to avoid the villagers knowing. Many
people try to report this condition to authorities, but there’s no improvement. For
the people around there, it seemed like goverment didn’t really care about this
condition and take sides with business. Sometimes the industries would try to
threaten the villagers to not to do anything and just obey. Even the factories would
pay someone to intimidate them, making it is hard for the villagers to do something.
Even the villagers have tried to close the industries water canal with rock to stop
their water waste flowing to the river and just to find the rock has been moved the
next day. In the end the villagers cant really do anything significant without the
authorities help.

In fact, if we see the reality, there’s a lot potential with the important role that
Citarum river have, we can get a massive benefits if we can clean this river. Not only
the ecological side, we would also get the economy benefits. The clean water would
improve the quality of people around the Citarum river life, revitalize the ecosystem,
improve the quality and quantity of farmers crops, restore the fish volume, and even
a crystal clear water condition could make water tourism grow.

It is heartbreaking to see and realize how this condition affected the life of many
people who depends on this river. From things like skin rash to the chemical
compounds that slowly killing the people. Everyone have the rights to get clean
water and life properly without afraid to get sick. Even when the condition already
became like this, there’s still a lot of people who didn’t care about the environment
and keep throwing rubbish, and keep ruin it. Especially the factories, they just care
about their business without thinking about the life of the people around the river
and keep being ignorant even when the authorities start to give warning after a long
time. To overcome this condition, we need time and coperation from all parties to
reach this same goal. We just can hope more people would realize this life
threatening condition, goverment would actually start management to clean the
river, educate the member of the community to properly disposing trash, shutting all
the factories that violated the regulations and not doing waste water treatment. And
hopefully in several years, we would actually see this river getting cleaner, along with
the life of the people around here.

References

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/indonesia-citarum-river-worlds-most-
polluted-toxic-waste-10124436

https://indohun.org/news/unravel-the-health-effects-of-the-worlds-dirtiest-river-cit
arum-river-indonesia/

https://thediplomat.com/2018/04/indonesias-citarum-the-worlds-most-polluted-riv
er/