Handayani, 57, was steering a volunteer rescue launch on the Nieuwe Maas when the electric ferry lost power shortly before 18:00 on 28 September. With the disabled vessel drifting towards a moored barge, she brought her launch alongside, passed a towline to the crew and guided the ferry to a quay. All nine passengers and two crew members reached shore safely.
The passengers were officials returning from a fiscal policy forum in Rotterdam’s Katendrecht district. Their rescue has made Handayani a sudden local hero — and revealed a connection few of them knew: before taking up river rescue, she helped build the government’s system for estimating how much rising borrowing costs would squeeze future budgets.
From debt desk to river
For 16 years, Handayani worked at the fictional State Borrowing Bureau, where analysts plan when government debt will need to be refinanced. She left in 2018, exhausted by long hours at a screen, and joined the Maas River Rescue Cooperative, a volunteer service that assists boats in trouble on the city’s waterways.
“You don’t get time to discuss the forecast when a boat is sliding towards steel,” she said in an interview on Tuesday, still wearing a navy jumper and damp canvas trousers. “You look at the current, get close enough to pass a line, and keep everyone calm. The rest can wait.”
Clémence Lecomte, a policy secretary who was aboard the ferry, said the engine failed without warning and the boat began turning broadside to the current. Handayani’s launch reached them in minutes. “She gave us a clear job to do and kept talking to the crew. We stepped off at the quay, and she was already checking whether anyone else needed help.”
The twist emerged over coffee after the rescue. Handayani recognised the officials’ presentation folder: the bureau’s “maturity ladder”, a schedule she helped design to show when old government loans would come due and what refinancing them might cost. The method, she said, is still used in budget scenarios, though few current staff have met its original author.
A costly budget calculation
The timing is sensitive. Dutch government borrowing costs have climbed in recent months; a 10-year bond yield reached 4.08% at Monday’s auction, its highest level in 15 years. The finance ministry’s latest forecast says higher refinancing costs could add €180 million (about $210 million) to annual interest spending by 2029, leaving less room for housing and transport plans.
Lola D. Malik, a budget adviser who was among those rescued, said the team had been travelling to discuss how to protect those programmes without breaking the government’s spending limits. Malik said Handayani’s old model was one of the tools in their briefing. “We thought we were going to debate her work,” she said. “We did not expect to meet the person who built it on the river.”
The lower house’s finance committee has invited Handayani to explain the model at a hearing later this month. She has agreed, but says she will keep her volunteer shifts. On Tuesday evening, she returned to the cooperative’s small quay-side shed, where a kettle was boiling and the rescue launch’s towline lay coiled to dry.
Handayani said she had not expected the two parts of her life to meet again, much less in front of nine officials she had just brought to safety. “I was proud of that work,” she said. “If they need me to explain it, I’ll go. But I’m not giving up the river.”
