An Indonesian rows a makeshift raft through a flooded Jakarta graveyard on February 9. Devastating floods in the Indonesian capital earlier this month have caused nearly one billion dollars worth of damage and losses.(AFP/File/Adek Berry)

Jakarta flood losses rise to nearly one billion dollars

JAKARTA (AFP) - Devastating floods in the Indonesian capital earlier this month have caused nearly one billion dollars worth of damage and losses.

National Development Planning Minister Paskah Suzetta said direct losses from infrastructure damage and state revenue were at least 5.2 trillion rupiah (572 million dollars), higher than his earlier estimate of 4.1 trillion rupiah.

Potential economic losses were estimated at another 3.6 trillion rupiah, newspapers quoted him as saying.

The floods which hit on February 2 covered much of the city and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. Some 85 people were killed in the sprawling city and surrounding districts.

Businesses and private individuals bore the brunt of the flood damage, accounting for 4.5 trillion of the estimated 5.2 trillion rupiah, while the government and related institutions and enterprises suffered about 650 billion rupiah in losses and damage.

He said the figures did not yet include damage to social and public facilities such as schools, clinics and hospitals.

"The flood has the potential to lower Jakarta's GDP growth by 0.59 percent in the industry and trade sector" and also hit growth in surrounding towns, he said.

Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar has blamed the floods on excessive construction on natural drainage areas, while city governor Sutiyoso has dismissed them as a "cyclical natural phenomenon."

Vice President Jusuf Kalla has told AFP that Sutiyoso and other officials should take responsibility for the devastation because of over-building which had not been accompanied by improved drainage.

"The richer people are, the more villas they build. So the mountains are full of villas. The green areas, including the rivers, are getting smaller and it is not balanced with a proper drainage system," he said.

Old Batavia, the former colonial port under Dutch rule from where Jakarta has expanded, was built on marshland and some areas of the capital are below sea level.

Surprising Solar Storms Rage at Sun's South Pole

Relatively calm weather was the standard forecast for the Sun, which is near the end of another 11-year solar cycle, but raging solar storms just spotted at its south pole now tell a different story.

At the start of a solar cycle, sunspots-regions on the Sun marked by cooler temperatures and intense magnetic activity-tend to appear near the poles and move towards the equator as the cycle concludes.

Scientists were therefore surprised when Ulysses, a joint European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA spacecraft currently embarking on its third tour around the Sun since launch in 1990, spotted intense solar storms near the Sun's south pole.

Solar storms are energetic explosions on the surface of the Sun caused by solar flares or coronal mass ejections, both of which tend to occur near sunspots.

'Particle events of this kind were seen during the second polar passes in 2000 and 2001, at solar maximum,' said Richard Marsden, ESA's Ulysses Project Scientist and Mission Manager. 'We certainly didn't expect to see them at higher latitudes at solar minimum.'

Ulysses also found that the Sun's south pole is currently cooler than its north pole. This is a reversal from 10 years ago, when the northern polar coronal hole was about 7 to 8 percent lower than the southern one. Coronal holes are like bald spots on the Sun: they are regions in the Sun's upper atmosphere, called the corona, where there is less heated gas than average. During solar minimum, coronal holes are mainly found at the Sun's polar regions; during solar maximum, they can be located anywhere.

'This implies that the asymmetry between north and south has switched with the change of the magnetic polarity of the Sun,' said George Gloeckler, Principal Investigator for the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) aboard Ulysses.

The Sun's magnetic field consists of a north pole, where the field flows out of the Sun, and a south pole, where the field re-enters. During solar maximum, when the Sun's activity is at a peak in its 11-year cycle, the poles exchange places.