Skip to contentReba Fitness Wall Calendar – With so many lives at stake, governments can only do so much to prevent catastrophic damage from future tsunamis, especially in poorer countries like Indonesia, says Seah. “What good work is being done?” Sah asks. “Yes. There are people trying to educate; there are people trying to build vertical drainage structures. But will that solve even 10 percent of the problem? I have my doubts.”
It began on the morning of Dec. 26, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) off the west coast of Sumatra, when a 9.1-magnitude earthquake — the third largest since 1900 — tore through the sea floor. Within eight minutes the fracture spread 700 miles (1,127 km), releasing 23,000 times more energy than the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, Japan.
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Portions of the shoreline moved 30 feet (9 m) to the west-southwest. On that fateful day ten years ago, the city of Banda Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra, Indonesia, was worst affected. More than 60,000 of its 264,000 inhabitants were killed – about 35 percent of the total lost in Indonesia.
Looking Back
Like other countries devastated by the 2004 tsunami, Indonesia is now connected to a tsunami detection system in the Indian Ocean. Once an earthquake strikes, that system of coastal sensors and surface buoys sends signals via satellite to government warning centers around the world, warning them that a tsunami is imminent.
Ten years later Banda Aceh has been rebuilt, and its population has returned to 250,000, roughly the same as it was before the disaster. The city has changed, with smooth new highways and lively late-night cafes.
Apart from several elaborate mass graves, and a few deliberate reminders of the disaster – such as the presence of a large ship in a city park – most signs of tsunami damage have been obliterated.
Faced with such an unforgivable margin between life and death, Indonesia has struggled to improve public awareness and preparedness. A handful of evacuation shelters — three- or four-story buildings, some with open ground floors that allow waves to pass through — have been erected in Banda Aceh and other at-risk cities.
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A Practice Run Goes Badly
There is a network of sirens to warn residents that a tsunami is near. Carrie Seah, a geologist at Nanyang Technological University’s Earth Observatory in Singapore, has spent more than 20 years studying the faults around Sumatra.
Geologists like Sieh can tell us when earthquakes have occurred in the past, and when and where they might occur in the future. They can’t tell us when to run, they can definitely tell that too many of us are living in dangerous places.
On April 11, 2012, when an 8.6 magnitude earthquake struck Banda Aceh, Indonesia’s National Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami warning within five minutes of the first earthquake. The country’s early warning system worked perfectly, but the local response to warnings did not bode well for future disasters.
Banda Aceh officials had failed to establish clear emergency guidelines for the city. Although the earthquake did not generate a tsunami—in this case the fault plate slipped, not violently uplifted—horribly experienced people expected it, and feared it.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Parts of the fault also rise thousands of feet, and carry entire columns of sea water over them. on the surface of the ocean, which created a wave—a tsunami that swept across the Indian Ocean.
When it reached Sumatra, it was over 100 feet (30 m) high along parts of the northwest coast. A decade ago such detectors were only in the Pacific. If they had been deployed in the Indian Ocean in 2004, some of the 51,000 people who died in Sri Lanka and India could have been saved: the tsunami took two hours to cross the Indian Ocean, and timely warning – or no warning – thousands.
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Lives are saved. Banda Aceh, however, is not the most threatened of Indonesia’s cities. “The shoe has already dropped there,” said Brian Atwater, a geologist with the US Geological Survey. “It’s not clear how often earthquakes happen again, and the fault that ruptured in 2004 cost everything in that earthquake, or whether there’s anything left in the bank. Padang is the next shoe to drop.”
Many locals attribute the existence of the Rahmatullah Mosque on the outskirts of Banda Aceh to divine intervention — but the mosque’s exposed ground floor may have helped wash away the tsunami. Nine days after the disaster, a US Marine helicopter delivers supplies.
Vivi Yanti, an English teacher in the city, describes the water as hot, black, oily and full of dirt. On streets jammed with fleeing people, Yanti saw a woman running, holding a boy’s hand, banging on the window of a passing car, begging for a ride.
No one stopped. “I ran away with my uncle on the back of a motorbike,” says Yanti. “I remember looking back, and at first I didn’t know what I was seeing – a big ship going down the water road. I said to my uncle, ‘Drive faster.’
Reports of a magnitude 7.5 earthquake this morning, which shook the central city of Donggala on the island of Sulawesi, prompted a tsunami warning similar to the one that killed millions in 2004. But Indonesia – the world’s fourth most densely populated country – is in a less fortunate position.
is surrounded by dangerous seismic faults, particularly a long, arching one called the Sunda Megathrust, which runs parallel to the islands of Sumatra and Java. That fault was struck off the coast of Sumatra by a tsunami that began in 2004. 30 minutes after the earthquake. Even with nearby tsunami warnings, many res
idents did not have enough time to get to higher ground.
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. American Red Cross in Indonesia “Everything stopped very quickly in Banda Aceh,” said Tom Alcido, adding that all those people in their cars must have been swept away. It was a wake-up call.” But in Indonesia and other countries bordering the Indian Ocean, such measures may be insufficient to protect the millions of people who live along the coast.
Even with the best warning systems and evacuation plans. People in harm’s way. In Southeast Asia alone, more than 10 million people live within a mile of a coast. Less than a mile from Banda Aceh, Padang, and all the other threatened coastal towns, there is no fail-safe protection against future tsunamis.
“The situation was completely chaotic,” says Serifah Marlina Al Mazir, a lifelong resident of Banda Aceh who worked for the Red Cross during the 2004 tsunami. People were leaving home instead of taking their children to school, causing traffic jams.
Ardito Kodijat, director of the Indian Ocean Tsunami Information Center in Jakarta, says Banda Aceh and other coastal cities in Indonesia need to establish well-marked evacuation routes and conduct regular tsunami drills, he says. Many people in Banda Aceh did not know the evacuation centers were being built.
Others, after witnessing the horrors of the 2004 tsunami, thought the structures would be unsafe, and tried to flee inside instead. “People could have been better prepared if there had been clear and strong guidance from the local government,” Kodijat says.
Geological evidence of past tsunamis suggests that parts of the Sunda megathrust, located near Padang, a city of one million people on Sumatra’s west coast, may be vulnerable to earthquakes. Indonesian and Padang government officials are aware of the risks.
As in Banda Aceh, evacuation routes have been planned and emergency shelters constructed.
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