The World Most Polluted River is Citarum River?

As we may know that water cover 75 % of our earth and only 0.62 % of usable water is spread across the globe. Water remains constant; they move, they change their physical appearance, they went trough cycles, but the amount remain constant. Nowadays, people are familiar with the term “Blue Gold”, just to highlight the importance of water in our life. Sadly, since the dawn of industrial age, our water had been polluted by many kinds of substance that man created.

A water body is polluted when pollutant enter the water body decreasing its quality causing a health hazard for any living creatures depended on it. From that point, the water will lost its use. Not all waste water caused pollution, because waste water is considered as pollutant when the waste water decreases water quality and diminishes its function. The decreasing of water quality mainly influenced by waste water characteristics (by type of waste water generated and the intensity of its production) and the water body ability to recuperate (by type of water body it had and the nature of its current).

Water pollution can be classified as; organic pollution, solid pollution, nutrient pollution, heavy metal pollution and thermal pollution. All of it can cause major health problem to human, change the balance of water ecosystem and may cause the water to be useless.

West Java, where I lived, had five groups of river; Ciliwung-Cisadane, Citarum, Cimanuk-Cisanggarung, Citanduy-Ciwulan and Cisodea-Cimandiri. This entire river flows to north coast of Java (to Java Sea). Among the rivers, Citarum River was one of the rivers suffered from severe pollution. The picture above was from Mail Online posted along an article titled “Is this The World Most Polluted River?” The picture depicted part of Citarum River that was named as the world most polluted river. It is said that it would take 3.5 billion US Dollar to clean and re-organize the environment and would take approximately 15 years to do it (Republika online 11 Desember 2008).

Citarum River receives waste water from various source including industry, agriculture and domestic. Just how bad the pollution is there? Well, in most parts of the river the level of DO or dissolved oxygen is below 2 mg/L, which means that the river has reached anaerobic state (a state where no or near nil level of oxygen). This means that there will be no life there except for certain microbiological life.

This is a staggering fact, because Citarum River has been used for years as the source for staple water. Water body indeed had the ability of self purification, but still, with limitations. To tackle a problem of such magnitude, would take a state-wide coordination’s. But first of all, it should be our conscious that took the first step towards betterment.