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By Gayatri Suroyo and Fathin Ungku
JAKARTA / PALU, Indonesia (Reuters) – Last month, when tsunami waves of up to six meters hit the Indonesian city of Palu, Didiek Wahyudi Kurniawan's home near the beach quickly submerged by water. the girls have barely time to escape.
"I know it's supposed to be a tsunami warning, but maybe it was obsolete, I have no idea, we never get a warning." said Kurniawan, 46 years old.
He said that he had gone out at that time, but that his family had escaped by walking in water up to the chest up to the building. three floors of a neighbor.
Her family was spared, but a large number of people attending a beach festival in Palu were washed away, adding more than 1,600 deaths to the magnitude 7.5 earthquake and tsunami confirmed so far.
Other survivors also stated that they had not heard any sirens, although a tsunami warning was issued and then lifted 34 minutes after the earthquake, based on available data from the nearest tide sensor, about 200 km from Palu, on the island of Sulawesi. .
As Indonesia grapples with the devastating earthquake, the apparent lack of preparedness in a sprawling archipelago that experiences regular tremors is in the spotlight.
A major effort has been made in the region to improve the warning systems after the 2004 tsunami, which killed more than 120,000 people in Indonesia alone, including the establishment of a network of 22 buoys. tsunami alert, set up with the help of Germany and the United States.
International agencies and countries have spent $ 4.6 billion on rebuilding the devastated province of Aceh in Indonesia, on the island of Sumatra, with new infrastructure such as health centers. evacuation strategically placed.
Nevertheless, with the first waves coming to Palu in the next four minutes and power and communications failing after the earthquake, SMS alerts or sirens would probably not have been enough, even if they worked.
Denis McClean, a spokesman for the US Agency for Disaster Risk Reduction, said at an information meeting that only public awareness would have saved people in these areas. circumstances.
"It happened very quickly, there was not much time for the broadcast of the warnings, so it depended a lot on the level of public awareness to save lives."
"The earthquake, it's the warning"
The spokesman of the Indonesian National Disaster Prevention Agency, Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, said that people still do not know what to do when a disaster occurs.
Unlike earthquake-prone countries, such as Japan and New Zealand, earthquake awareness and drills are conducted sporadically in Indonesia.
"The problem of tsunami early warning systems is not the structure, nor its tools, but the culture of our communities," Nugroho told reporters.
Palu has some signs indicating the tsunami evacuation path, but Mokhtar, a resident, said he was aware of the government-sponsored simulations featured on TV about what to do. during an earthquake, but that he had not seen it on the ground.
"There is a warning system but that day there was no siren or anything," said the 51-year-old civil servant, adding that "there is no warning siren or anything". he had never heard of the warning system.
Nugroho, of the disaster agency, said that communities sometimes vandalize early warning tools, such as tsunami buoys.
The network of 22 buoys in Indonesia, which are connected to seabed sensors, has been unusable since 2012, often due to negligence or vandalism.
Fishermen often used buoys to tie up their boats, sometimes damaging sensors, while in one case a buoy was towed by fishermen from their original anchorage to another part of the sea at sea. wide of Sulawesi.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo has called for buoy repair or replacement this week, but experts and officials say investments have also been neglected in other areas.
According to data from the disaster agency, out of about 1,000 tsunami sirens needed throughout Indonesia, only 56 are in place.
Approximately 3,100 km (1,920 miles) of evacuation routes have been established for a need of 11,900 km (compared to 7,500 km), while there are only 50 evacuation shelters against 2,200 needed , according to the data.
Indonesian parliament speaker Bambang Soesatyo has pledged to support the budget in this direction, at least in the case of buoys.
Adam Switzer, a tsunami expert at the Observatory of the Earth in Singapore, said from evidence that the Palu tsunami had apparently been caused by an underwater landslide.
"The earthquake is a warning, the first thing to do is to stay in a safe space until the jolts stop and then move away from the coast. It's an education issue, "said Switzer, stressing that it needed to" be rooted in every child in Asia, especially in Southeast Asia. "
Even putting aside the human cost, there are strong economic arguments for doing more to prepare for disasters.
Udrekh, a claims adjuster with the Indonesian Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT), said that Indonesia was discussing with Japan about a possible investment in seabed cables with tsunami and earthquake detectors, similar to a Japanese system. These cables would be less vulnerable and faster than buoys and cost 300 billion rupees ($ 19.8 million) per year for 200 km, he said.
"We always say for disaster infrastructure that you save $ 7 for every dollar investment you make, so it's necessary and the cost is nothing compared to that of $ 1. 39, other infrastructures, "he said.
He estimated that Indonesia was losing about 30 trillion rupees ($ 2 billion) every year as a result of disasters, but that it was spending too little for the mitigation infrastructure disasters and education.
"It's as if we had never learned in 2004," he told Reuters.
($ 1 = 15 185,0000 rupees)
(Additional report by Fanny Potkin to JAKARTA and Stephanie Ulmer-Nebehay in GENEVA, Writing by Ed Davies, edition of Raju Gopalakrishnan)
