The Jakarta Globe, Tuesday 1 Sep 2015,
Jakarta. Officials have promised there will be no disruptions to the TransJakarta bus service following a huge blaze at a bus depot on Tuesday evening that gutted 18 of the vehicles.
Daryono, the operations manager at Trans Batavia, one of the private companies licensed to operate on the TransJakarta network, said all 126 of its buses plying corridors II and III would operate as normal on Wednesday.
He said the fire at the Trans Batavia depot in Rawa Buaya, West Jakarta, destroyed 18 buses, but stressed that these were vehicles that were no longer in use and that were being decommissioned for scrap.
“They weren’t operational buses. We can assure you that none of the 126 buses that we operate on corridors II and III were affected,” he said.
“We guarantee that this incident will not affect operations on those two corridors,” he added.
Police said the fire began at around 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, when mechanics at the depot noticed a thick cloud of smoke emerging from one of the decommissioned buses. At the time there were 38 buses at the depot.
“They tried to put out the fire with the fire extinguishers they had at hand, but the wind fanned the flames and allowed the fire to spread,” said Sr. Comr. Mohammad Iqbal, a spokesman for the Jakarta Police.
He added that no one was hurt in the blaze, which firefighters managed to put out before it could spread to the depot’s refueling pump less than 100 meters away from where the fire broke out.
TransJakarta corridor II runs 14 kilometers from the Kota Harapan housing estate in Bekasi, on the eastern outskirts of Jakarta, to Harmoni in Central Jakarta. Corridor III goes from Kalideres in West Jakarta to Pasar Baru in Central Jakarta.
Trans Batavia is one of 10 private bus companies licensed to operate TransJakarta buses.
*
wo 2 sep 2015 - 0:56