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PALU, Indonesia – Muslims' call to prayer had begun to resonate in the Indonesian city of Palu when Musrifah's house began to shake violently.
Family photos have fallen from the walls. The dishes and glasses crashed on the floor. A television shattered on the white tiles in their living room, pushing Musrifah to take his 2-year-old son into his arms.
A few seconds later, the concrete sides of their one – story home cracked and collapsed, filling the air with light clouds of dust.
"Mom!" Shouted the terrified boy, his body shaking as his hands pressed to his back.
"Do not worry," she told him. "I am here."
It was 18:02 on Friday, September 28, and what followed in the next 10 minutes was a remarkable disaster, even judging by the standards of Indonesia, predisposed to disasters. The magnitude 7.5 earthquake triggered not only a tsunami that leveled coastal districts, but also a geological phenomenon called liquefaction, in which the soil began to move like a liquid and engulf entire neighborhoods in the earth.
Disasters would kill around 2,000 people. Thousands more would be missing. Among them was Musrifah's son, Bima Alfarezi.
THE TERRAIN ALWAYS TREMBLES
Musrifah grew up on the island of Sulawesi, where Palu is located, and is accustomed to earthquakes. Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 260 million people, is located in one of the world's most seismic regions, an arch of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin, known as the "Ring of Fire". .
Though they may be scary, earthquakes at Palu have rarely caused serious damage.
After the 2004 tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries, more than half of them in Indonesia, the threat of deadly waves was etched in the national imagination. However, Palu had not experienced it during his lifetime, and most people thought the city was safe because it was at the foot of a relatively narrow long bay, shaded on both sides by lush mountains. .
"We thought it would protect us" from the violence of the sea, said Musrifah, a nurse who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name.
And few people here, if any, had ever heard of liquefaction.
So, when five punches of a magnitude between 4.8 and 6.1 shook the region for several hours this Friday – the first hit at 3 pm. – Musrifah did not think much about it. She visited her family and dinner was soon to be served.
Then the big earthquake hit and in the space of just one minute, several neighborhoods in the city of 380,000 inhabitants were wiped out. The buildings of the city collapsed, including a hotel and shopping center in the city center, where dozens of people were killed on the spot, other trapped and begging for help. The cell towers became distorted, destroying the lines of communication, while the airport control tower collapsed as a last plane took flight.
Although much of Palu is still standing, chaos was everywhere.
At the home of Musrifah, near the coast of Palu Bay, his family rushed to an open-air terrace to find it blocked on all sides by the rubble of collapsed houses.
Still lulling her son, she thought the worst was over.
Devastating water walls
According to the Indonesian authorities, the shallow earthquake was 200 times more powerful than the atomic bomb launched by US forces on Hiroshima during the Second World War. A large-scale tsunami swept through Palu Bay.
A cell phone video broadcast on local television showed the moment when the long white crescent of the wave, clearly visible in dark green water, approached the shore.
A man filming the scene from a garage shouts to those below: "Tsunami! Tsunami! … Run! Go!"
As people scream and panicked drivers honk, they can be seen running and climbing walls to get away from the beach.
When the wave crosses the shore, it sweeps over the brown-roofed houses, turns them around and crushes them in submerged vehicles. As the houses separate, swirling in a dark soup of debris, the man starts crying, "Oh my God! Oh my God!"
Prisoner on her broken terrace, Musrifah had no idea what was going on. The sea had gone through what was left of her house and her family was standing in the water that was rising above their knees.
His only thought was to escape. She tightened her son stronger as he repeated, "I'm scared, Mom, I'm scared."
Two minutes later, Musrifah heard another roar. Instinctively, she looked up at the sky above the rubble that blocked her path, and saw a dark wall of water whose ridge was just approaching a palm tree.
Before she could blink, the wave broke on them and everything went dark. The overwhelming force of the tsunami snatched Bima and rocked Musrifah backwards into the churn.
Under the water, she grabs a slab of concrete and manages to break free of the wave. At that moment, she had been transported one kilometer away.
She was alone.
Soaked and shocked, all she could do was call, her haunted cries piercing the darkness: "Bima! Bima! Where is my Bima?
The earthquake and tsunami struck the coast with such power that the yellow backbone of the city's iconic Teluk Palu broke, sending it downriver. Along the coast of Palu Bay, the coast was strewn with broken vehicles, shredded slabs of debris and slaughtered utility poles.
All that remained of Musrifah's house was his foundation. Not a single possession has remained.
WHOLE VILLAGES SWALLOWED
Two kilometers inland, while the earthquake shook the Balaroa neighborhood, residents were faced with a totally different calamity, which many later described as a soil tsunami.
When the ground cracked, mud and earth moving like a liquid passed through newly excavated chasms and burst through the floor of the houses. It was a swirling sea of mud and waves of earth rising and swallowing practically everything that was going on in sight.
Multi-storey villas were knocked down, cars still in their garages. The golden spiers of one of the most beautiful mosques in the region collapsed into ruins.
As dusk gave way to darkness, many fires broke out and lit up the night.
The phenomenon known as liquefaction occurs when loose soil in water near the surface loses its strength and collapses. In parts of Palu, parts of entire neighborhoods were transported tens of meters to the east.
Asran, a resident of Balaroa, fed his goats when the earthquake struck and was amazed to see part of his neighborhood literally parting. When the ground stopped moving after a few minutes, her home – severely cracked but largely untouched – sat on the edge of a new crater that lost nearly two floors.
"The mud came from underneath, lifted all the buildings, then sucked them," said the 56-year-old, who uses only one name. "It seemed like the soil was on a roller coaster."
Half an hour east, 32-year-old Erli Yati even tried to run away on a motorcycle, but the road was short because the road was on the left because left, right and back, high above me. "
"People were screaming," Help! Help! 'But it was impossible to help them,' she said. "They were dragged by the mud."
The social media video that appears to have been filmed in Petobo shows a red-roofed house gliding along a row of palm trees as if it were navigating a fast-flowing river. In the distance, two palm trees are quickly sucked, one after the other, into the earth, in front of the house where the filming begins of the man who films the scene, swaying like a boat on the # 39; ocean.
After several terrifying minutes, everything finally stopped.
There is not much of Petobo left except in a muddy plain of mud and sweet earth which, like Balaroa, is in a newly created crater. On the edge, a formerly flat rice field is now zigzagging on the hill as if it had been separated and replanted on multi-storey terraces.
According to the government, more than 5,000 people may be missing in these two neighborhoods, where more than 3,000 homes have been destroyed or disappeared.
It is so difficult to extract the bodies, the authorities discuss the opportunity to turn the devastated areas into mass graves.
GRUELLEUSE SEARCH
Back along the shore, Musrifah followed the crowd of other traumatized survivors into the dark streets of the nearby mosque that quickly turned into a relief camp.
It was there just after midnight when Musrifah was reunited with her husband Hakim and their 5 year old daughter who were together before the earthquake.
The couple stood strong and cried.
Hakim then asked Musrifah, "Where is our son?"
"I could not hold it back," she says. "I'm really sorry, I could not protect him from that."
The next morning, the couple combed the area around their old house, becoming a flattened field of intertwined wood, concrete, sheet metal and other rubble.
For five days, they crossed the wreck, calling Bima as the emergency crews pulled the bodies out of the debris.
They went to all the hospitals in the city and asked officials to unpack bag by bag, containing corpses of young children. There seemed to be too much to count.
None of them was Bima.
Then, on Thursday noon, something inside Musrifah told him to look into a pile of mutilated debris about 200 yards from where their home was.
Almost immediately, she saw a small body stuck face down between a gas cartridge and a pile of shredded wood beams. The boy wore a dark gray shirt and turquoise pants just as Bima was the day the tsunami ripped him from his arms.
His bloated body was so decomposed that it was however not possible to recognize his face. But when she saw Ultraman's blue sandals on her feet, she was sure of it. It was him.
An hour later, a rescue team placed him in a black bag and closed it. And then Musrifah did something that she had dreamed and feared for almost a week.
She put her arms around her son and squeezed hard.
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