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Jakarta Post

Tragic collapses: Some can be prevented

To the ground: Two men gaze over the rubble of the Big White Coffee building in Medan, North Sumatra

Duncan Graham (The Jakarta Post)
Cirebon, West Java
Thu, April 25, 2019

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Tragic collapses: Some can be prevented

T

o the ground: Two men gaze over the rubble of the Big White Coffee building in Medan, North Sumatra. The four-story building suddenly collapsed in April. (JP/Apriadi Gunawan)

It does not always take an earthquake to smash and kill.

The morning of April 16 last year dawned like any other in the village of Gegesik outside the port city of Cirebon, West Java, about 220 kilometers east of Jakarta.

Samini, 40, had sent her daughter, Tri Hana Sita, 10, off to primary school. Her eldest son, Aridh Newton Rachman, 22, was working far away.

At the rear of the family’s house was a small studio that had been built of precast concrete blocks the year before. Here Samini’s husband Suherman bin Basan, 48, a dalang (puppet master) was leading a rehearsal of his gamelan group, called the Hidayat Jati, with the couple’s second son, Aziz Isaac Fathur Rachman, 20, and eight local children.

The members of the group were getting ready for shows later in the month.

“It was about half past 10 [in the morning],” said Samini. “I just went out to buy a gas bottle and a few other things.”

“I wasn’t more than 100 meters away, but I didn’t hear anything. Then I saw people running to our house.”

An old 9-m high barn alongside the studio had collapsed.

The windowless building had small openings to encourage walet (native swifts) to breed. Their nests are harvested to make Chinese soup, but the birds had deserted the empty building before it suddenly tumbled onto the studio.

Rubble: Close-up of the remaining walls of the studio in which Samini's husband died. (Photo by Erlinawati Graham)
Rubble: Close-up of the remaining walls of the studio in which Samini's husband died. (Photo by Erlinawati Graham)

Seven died instantly, including Suherman and Aziz, their bodies brutally disfigured by the tumbling bricks. Two girls and a boy were injured but have since recovered.

In the Western world, there would have been be a coroner’s inquest and charges laid against the barn owner for failing to keep the building sound. The local government would also have been held responsible for not ensuring regulations were followed.

The builders of the studio would also have been summoned. The remaining walls, only eight centimeters thick, show haphazard construction using low-quality mortar easily crumbled by hand. There was no obvious reinforcement and the blocks are not in line.

“There was no wind, no rain and no earthquake,” said Samini. 

“Some said the foundations had not been properly dug, but the barn had been in place for more than 10 years.”

In villages, other explanations have to be found. Inevitably, they involved the supernatural and it was hard to remain skeptical.

A pink-flowering bush provides a splash of color amid the grey rubble of smashed bricks and shattered asbestos sheets that was once the music studio. It was the only living thing in the debris and Samini said it was not planted by her or anyone else. It thrives on the spot where her husband died.

Suherman and Umer’s lives were not insured. Nor was the building. Apart from big companies and the rich, few buy insurance in Indonesia.

Revisited memory: Samini in the rubble of the studio by the plant marking the place where her husband died. (Photo by Erlinawati Graham)
Revisited memory: Samini in the rubble of the studio by the plant marking the place where her husband died. (Photo by Erlinawati Graham)

As a dalang, Suherman was said to be gifted with paranormal powers. Before his sudden death he told his wife he had a dream of her becoming wealthy.

Since the accident she’s received compensation from the government and the barn owner, although she does not want the sums published for fear of arousing envy among her neighbors. She has also received support from a city almost 8,000 km away, namely Wellington, the quake-prone capital of New Zealand.

Cirebon has a longtime link to Wellington.

In the 1970s the late ethnomusicologist Allan Thomas, who had been studying in Cirebon, bought a 10-piece gamelan set and 140 wayang kulit shadow puppets that were threatened by fundamentalists seeking to stamp out local culture.

Some of the instruments were 400 years old and had not been played for half a century. In Wellington, they were restored with the help of the Indonesian Embassy; they were called “The First Smile” and used for concerts.

Dance teacher and musician Jennifer Shennan said her late husband often spoke of music going beyond business and politics, helping people from different cultures get to know and understand each other better through feeling.

So, when New Zealanders heard of the Gegesik tragedy they held a concert and raised enough cash to help Samini develop a business. The money has been used to build a warung (shop) on the front of her house where she plans to sell necessities.

All that is left: A girl sits on the rubble of her home in Palu, Central Sulawesi. The home crumbled following ground liquification after an earthquake hit the city. (JP/Ruslan Sangadji)
All that is left: A girl sits on the rubble of her home in Palu, Central Sulawesi. The home crumbled following ground liquification after an earthquake hit the city. (JP/Ruslan Sangadji)

She remains doubtful about the logical explanations for the building’s collapse and keeps asking why it happened and why then. 

“Some people were jealous of my husband and his success and for reviving the wayang kulit,” she said. 

“Maybe he was cursed by someone using black magic.”

Or maybe the curse should be put on the builders who cut costs and corners and the bureaucrats who failed to police the regulations, a situation that has made infrastructure and building failures take place not only in small cities like Cirebon but also in large metropolises as well.

Late last year, for example, a major road in Surabaya, the capital of East Java and Indonesia’s second largest city, suddenly collapsed. Fortunately no deaths were reported. 

Some blamed an earthquake or sinkhole, but Sutopo Purwo Nugroho of the National Board for Disaster Management (BNPB) said it was caused by construction errors, again highlighting the lack of controls in the building business.

The lack of controls, inevitably, also makes the situation even worse when an earthquake happens.

The biggest in Indonesia last year was the magnitude-7.5 quake that hit Palu, the capital of Central Sulawesi. Engineers blamed poor construction and houses built on land prone to soil liquefaction for some of the 4,400 deaths.

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