Wednesday 9 november 2011

Today was our first day of the fieldtrip. Starting the day with a good breakfast, we were ready to get on the bus to drive to BAPPEDA (Regional Planning and Development Agency) of Surakarta City. At BAPPEDA, we were welcomed by head of Bappeda of Surakarta City, Mr. Anung Indro Susanto and his team. Following that, we heard several presentations related to our main topic: water management. Surakarta can be seen as the best city related to water and waste management. Within the last couple of years a lot of improvement could be made. The PDAM (Regional Company of Drinking Water) is the coordinating power on water and waste related problems within the Region. For Solo, as one of the quickly growing cities within in Indonesia, those issues are very present and important to deal with.

Since 19 July 1999, installation of sewerage treatment has been built in Surakarta. There are two different kinds of system, on site and off site system. The off site system is a pipe system while the on site system uses tools like the septic tanks. Surakarta has done a lot of improvement to increase the quality of the sewerage, as an example, there has been an increase of sewerage capacity, development of secondary pipe network within the business area.

Further there can be drawn a long history of drinking water supply. 57 % of Solo’s population have access to drinking water from PDAM. There are still many problems to face, including water loss of almost 40% due to old pipes and the water meter. For the future, government of Surakarta has two strategies: for short term, they want to increase water treatment capacity in Semanggi. For the long time planning, they want to make some cooperation with the surrounding cities which are Wonogiri, Sukoharjo, Surakarta, Karanganyar, and Sragen (WOSUSOKAS) in order to have advantages of regional hydrogeological conditions.

After the presentation, there has been a productive discussion about water and waste disposal management in Surakarta. (Annisa/Johanna)

After the presentation of the project Solo Surakarta, we went into the city to lunch. When we were all full of the great meal, we went on to visit the waste water installation in the southern part of Solo. Here we could see how the sewersystem works. The installation is one of the two working waste water installations of the city. In front of the air streatment bassin was a buffer installed, wich recieves the incoming waste water. This buffer gives a controlled amount of waste water to the air bassin. After this proces of treatment the waste water is discharged into the river.

An other part of the system of controlling the waste water are the public toilets. These are build in the area's where the people cannot affort to create a connetion to the sewersystem. These buildings are controlled and maintained by the government. The people who uses these facilities can pay monthly or every time they use the bathroom.

After this day trip we went back to the hotel to have a spa massage!