The long weekend Christmas holiday was supposed to be fun and relaxing for thousands of people enjoying their time off in Anyer, Banten, but Mother Nature had other ideas.

Early-warning buoys were either absent or broken when last Saturday’s tsunami roared through the Sunda Strait and hit the shores of Anyer, killing more than 400, smashing villages and resorts.

Even if the devices had been present they would have made no difference. An undetectable freak undersea landslip sent the high-speed wave across the narrow strait, say geologists.

Measurable earthquakes cause most tsunamis, so buoys and other gear desperately need upgrading. The tragedy has goaded the government, with President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo pledging to review the budget for disaster readiness.

That’s welcome news for the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG). Its 2018 budget was about Rp 1.7 trillion (US$116 million). It claims more than double is needed to modernize the tsunami warning system, but this is still not enough.

Among the first outsiders to know of a natural disaster are the young scientists working in an eerie chamber on the second floor of the BMKG headquarters in central Jakarta.

The scientists squat on the notorious 40,000-kilometer-long circle of Pacific coastlines, a Ring of Fire where more than 75 percent of the world’s volcanoes spew terror and their attendant quakes turn buildings to rubble.

At any one time at least six staff members watch two giant screens cluttered with maps and quivering with ever-changing data.

If all sensors across the world’s largest archipelago and neighboring seas and lands are in place and working well, an earthquake would be reported within seconds.

A signal flashes to the circling 1.3-ton Himawari 8 Japanese satellite 36,000 km above the equator, then dives down to the BMKG.

An alarm shrills and then a stentorian voice speaks.

“Attention, attention, attention. Earthquake detected. Please check your data as soon as possible,” the voice says.

In less than five minutes the staff must analyze the flood of information suddenly swamping their screens.

Information engineers’ favorite saying is “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO). If key data is unavailable or corrupted then decisions are also likely to be flawed.

No warnings came before the Sunda Strait tragedy, but the situation was different in Central Sulawesi on Sept. 28. On that Friday evening, the system failed for the people of Palu.

Coping With Complacency

A recent Lion Air flight from Jakarta to Malang had six uniformed off-duty flight attendants seated by mid-cabin exits. Despite knowing the routines inside out, they were still publicly instructed by the crew on how to open the windows and deploy the slides.

Unnecessary? Not to the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations’ authority that sets emergency procedure rules.

No matter how experienced the passengers, they still get lectured about seat belts, life rafts and a whistle to attract attention.

What has become a standard in the aviation industry is not happening in Indonesia when it comes to natural disaster preparedness.

According to the National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB), Indonesia, an archipelagic country surrounded by a volcanic ring of fire, had more than 2,300 floods, hurricanes and landslides in 2017, with almost 400 people killed or missing and more than 1,000 injured and 3.5 million displaced.

Despite Indonesia being prone to natural disasters, the sense of urgency to be better prepared to deal with such events is lacking, for whatever reason.

“It is different in Japan,” said geophysicist Tri Handayani, who like many BMKG scientists has been trained in the East Asian nation.

“The realization of danger is embedded in the culture from grandparents through to little children. They all know what to do.”

Meanwhile, BMKG head Dwikorita Karnawati said she remembered 2008 as the golden year of awareness among Indonesians, who were still traumatized by the Indian Ocean tsunami, which destroyed Aceh and killed nearly a quarter of a million people four years earlier.

In that year, politicians also worked hard to pass laws to create the Indonesian tsunami early warning system (InaTEWS), but then people began to forget.

Budgets were trimmed and training courses given less attention. Rigid rules became rubbery. This happened despite the InaTEWS guidebook stating that knowing what to do “depends on the preparedness both of local institutions and communities at risk […] who are obliged to analyze the tsunami risk, prepare tsunami contingency and evacuation plans”.

Dwikorita estimates the BMKG requires at least Rp 3.5 trillion to get the InaTEWS working efficiently.

“The money wouldn’t go to staff [she already has almost 5,000 employees across 31 centers in the archipelago], but on modern equipment and training,” she said.

“The government is now preparing an additional budget for the enhancement of the existing tsunami warning system; this would more than double the 2018 budget allocation.”

The law orders local authorities to implement instructions. The rules even stipulate the duty of hotel managers to explain escape routes to guests.

“If there’s no community engagement it’s very challenging for our warnings to turn into action,” Dwikorita said.

“Among the many problems is that leaders and officials constantly change; so do their policies.”

Homes, shops and offices collapsed because they had been badly built, or erected on unstable ground.

Natural hazards expert Phil Cummins of the Australian National University worked on an aid program with Australian and Indonesian scientists updating the National Seismic Hazard Map. This underpins the building code.

“The problem is that the code is only applied and enforced for tall buildings [above eight floors] in Java,” he said. “It should be used for a wider class of buildings, but that could really drive up construction costs.”

The geological events that caused the quake and tsunami are still being researched, but some academics, including Cummins, claim the death toll was not a failure of technology, but of education and planning.

Associate professor Adam Switzer of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) said he believed that no tsunami model could accurately provide a warning for what happened in Palu.

“The earthquake is the warning and people need to be educated to move quickly away from the coast or get to an elevated position as soon as the shaking stops,” said Switzer, who is also a principal investigator at Earth Observatory of Singapore. “[Computer] tsunami models are very effective in places at a distance where the earthquake may not have been felt but a tsunami is heading in that direction. In the local sense like Palu, the tsunami will be at your feet before the warning arrives.”

Dwikorita said her office has produced a limited edition of a thin brochure entitled “What You Should Do Before and After an Earthquake” as a way to educate the public. Although it has some cartoons, it is also text heavy.

In New Zealand, schoolchildren are simply taught to DROP (to the floor) COVER (with desk or chair) and HOLD — and to know evacuation routes.

Internationally, the Great Shakeout earthquake drills keep the public alert. More than 62 million participants in 62 countries have registered. The Philippines has 7 million, Mexico 9 million and Iran 14 million.

Indonesia, with thousands of quakes per year and 26 million primary school students, has just 196 individuals
involved.

The present surge in building roads and railways recalls last century’s exciting age of development. The downside is that maintenance and equipment replacement requests from dull departments, including the BMKG’s need to fully develop the InaTEWS, slip off the list of priorities.

“The question is not whether Rp 3.5 trillion would be enough, it is how coastal communities can be better prepared,” said Indonesian academic Jonatan Lassa, who lectures in humanitarian emergencies and disaster management at Australia’s Charles Darwin University.

“Technical updates are necessities; this very much depends on negotiations by the upper-stream of InaTEWS plus politicians. Having solid sub-systems at the downstream end [communities] and the middle stream [local governments] is not yet in the minds of policymakers.

“What’s always neglected is community preparedness. So far, we have only a few episodes of ‘unfinished reform’. Policy responses for a long-term solution are also slow. I can’t see how reform is taking shape.”

Dwikorita stopped short of arguing for fewer agencies and more cooperation; these are policy issues and could unleash political pique if a bureaucrat ventured too far. However, she did say that “in my correspondence with ministers I always note that in the 1945 Constitution, it is the state’s role to protect the entire Indonesian nation”.

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