Why Indonesia Failed to Contain Tsunami-Related Devastation

In today’s time, the best way of evading nature’s wrath is, probably, to avoid it. Avoidance comes by means of predicting a natural hazard, with all the technological progresses in use and taking measures well in advance.

Indonesia, laden with frequent earthquakes and habitual tsunami, has shown passivity in its implementation of disaster managing programmes that showed up in the devastation that Palu had to face recently.  The existing early warning systems were defunct and new advanced systems were not deployed due to curtailment of funds.

On September 28, this year, a large earthquake and the following tsunami reduced Indonesia’s provincial capital Palu into swathes of rubble. The casualties, as per the official record, crossed 2,000. The actual figure may be higher.  

In 2004, Indonesia suffered a ravaging 9.1 magnitude earthquake that resulted in a tsunami which killed some 70,000 people across countries. This is one of the deadliest disasters that modern history has witnessed. Since then, frequent earthquakes and tsunamis have hit Indonesia. But robust systems of a tsunami warning, early preparedness and city planning—all have been plunged into a mire of negligence. It is the high time the people of Indonesia and the government gave urgent attention to these issues, the lack of which is surely going to bring more sorrows to Indonesia.

The level of unpreparedness in the Palu tsunami can easily be imagined by the revelation of Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the spokesperson of the Indonesian Disaster Management Board, that he himself came to know about the Palu tsunami through social media and TV.

Saut Sagal, Professor at the Bandung Institute of Technology, in his statement to New Yorker said if the apathy on part of the government continued, investment on disaster risk reduction continued to remain bleak and the lack of preparedness of the communities stayed, then Indonesia would continue to witness more disaster-related casualties in the time to come. He also said that the government needed to speed up its efforts to educate the population to be better prepared for disasters; buildings should be fitted with seismic shock absorbers and proper city planning was required to move people away from vulnerable areas.

The Disaster Management Board of Indonesia was established in 2008. The board, with help from Germany and the United States, built an early warning system for tsunamis. They invested millions of dollars to implant 22 sensor-laden buoys. But these have now become defunct. Even at the time of the Palu tsunami, none of these were working. The computers connected with the buoys emitted electric fields and fishes used to gather in it, which drew the fishermen near the equipment. Fishing in the area destroyed the equipment.

Loiuse Comfort, a disaster management expert at University of Pittsburgh, is  leading a project to make equipment that can be helpful for Indonesia to prepare for tsunamis. Comfort, along with a team of researchers from both the US and Indonesia, has developed a new type of sensor for tsunami warnings. The earlier buoys used to transmit data every 15 minutes, but Comfort and her team’s newly developed sensor system would transmit data every one to three minutes, rendering more efficiency in forewarning a tsunami like the one that devastated Palu.

Moreover, these sensors, if implanted, would have been situated at the sea floor—meaning they would have been safe from vandalism, as seen in the case of  the earlier buoys. The Indonesian government was interested in using Comfort’s sensors, but this was stalled citing lack of funds. In the meeting that took place just a few weeks prior to the tsunami, the relevant agencies declared that this upgrade could not be done due to a lack of  funds.

On September 28, the 7.5 magnitude quake hit around 6 p.m. The meteorology and geophysics agency, soon after that, issued a tsunami alert. But surprisingly the warning ended at 6.36 pm.

The epicenter of the earthquake was located in central Sulawesi, almost 77 km from Palu. The BMKG (the meteorology and geophysics agency) cancelled the tsunami warning because it did not have data from Palu. They couldn’t judge that the tsunami would hit Palu rather than Sulawesi.

Adam Switzer, a tsunami expert in Singapore in his interview to New York Times said that the existing models of tsunami warning are very simplistic. They can’t take into account multiple events and multiple quakes at a time.