TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Banten Police drop plan to summon scientist
Change Size
A house in Tasikmalaya, West Java, is badly damaged following an 6.9 magnitude earthquake that rattles the southern part of Java on Thursday night. (Courtesy of/BNPB)
T
he Banten Police have reportedly dropped their plan to summon coastal disaster expert Widjo Kongko in connection with a criminal investigation, a colleague of the scientist has said.
"The Banten Police chief has canceled the legal process," Henny Warsilah, a senior sociologist and earthquake mitigation expert at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday evening.
Widjo, a coastal engineer and disaster risk expert at the Agency for the Assessment and Application of Technology (BPPT), recently delivered a presentation as part of a discussion on "Tsunami Potential" that covered several coastal regions in southwestern Java. Widjo's presentation quickly became a viral controversy after detik.com, a popular online news portal, reported the assessment, erroneously dubbing it a "tsunami prediction".
Detik.com's report, which was originally published on Apr. 3 under the heading, "BPPT Predicts Potential for 57-Meter High Tsunami in Pandeglang", claimed that Widjo had "predicted" the potential disaster. Widjo had said in his presentation that the tsunami could only occur in what he referred to as "the worst possible scenario".
Pandeglang is located on western coast of Java, the most populated island in the country, and falls under the administration of Banten province.
Banten Police had previously planned to summon Widjo based on the detik.com report, which had triggered widespread public concern and apparently disrupted the province's investment climate.
Henny said the police had asked the BPPT, LIPI and the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) to explain the matter to the public directly, and were ready to facilitate the agencies' efforts in educating the public.
Meanwhile, detik.com has since apologized for using the word "prediction" in both the heading and in reference to Widjo's presentation in its misleading article, based on a letter from the BPPT scientist. The news portal also corrected the figure of the "potential tsunami" to 57.1 meters. (ahw)
