On August 12th, 2018, the Peta Bencana Foundation transformed a portion of a heavily traversed road in Semarang with an anamorphic street art installation, exclusively designed towards building resilience for the forthcoming monsoon season! Every Sunday morning in Semarang, main roads in the center of the city are closed off to vehicles for the weekly Car Free Day event, making way for thousands of walkers, joggers, bikers, and skaters. Peta Bencana took this opportunity to launch a preparedness event for the 2018/2019 monsoon season; as passers-by stopped to take selfies with the street art installation, they were reminded to continue to share their selfies with PetaBencana.id during the monsoon season, and contribute to real-time community flood-mapping. PetaBencana.id gathers confirmed crowd-sourced reports about flooding from various social media channels and visualizes these on a free web-based map, so that everyone has the information they need to stay safe and avoid danger during flood events. This information is shared with emergency management agencies, who are also able to update the map with time-critical flood-related information, creating a transparent two-way communication channel for everyone in the city. The Jakarta Emergency Management Agency (BPBD DKI Jakarta) also took this opportunity to spread awareness about their disaster management programs to the Car Free Day visitors. BPBD Kota Semarang members also explained their role in response efforts during flooding and the value that the crowd-sourced reports coming into PetaBencana.id would have for disaster managers in supporting evidence-based response.
Several residents expressed the importance of understanding the role of BPBD Kota Semarang during flood events. BPBD Kota Semarang members expressed the value of having the opportunity to not only inform the public about their initiatives, but also the significance of being able to engage in deeper conversations with university students, even inviting the students to visit their Data and Command Center. The feedback demonstrated that the event was successful in supporting the strengthening of community networks, and building collective understandings of community based efforts for flood resilience.
Several car free day visitors expressed their enthusiasm for the event, explaining that it was uncommon and very welcome to have a free public event, that engaged various communities, NGOs, and disaster management agencies. Visitors were eager to learn about the launch of the platform in Semarang, commenting that with the increasing frequency of flood events in Semarang, the platform would serve as a useful tool to share flood information and support them in navigating the city safely.
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