‘It was like a bomb exploded’
Indonesian volcano’s eruption left no time to flee before tsunami hit
A 30year-old fisherman was home watching television Saturday evening when he heard a deep, booming noise offshore.
Living on the western coast of Java, the fisherman, Damin, was accustomed to the explosive sounds of the volcanic island, Anak Krakatau, which has erupted almost daily since June. But this time, its roar was unusually loud, he said Tuesday.
“We are used to hearing something like that, but the sound was so big,” said Damin, who like many Indonesians uses one name. “It was different. It was like a bomb exploded.”
The sound turned out to be the only warning of killer waves, which scientists theorize were produced by a large landslide either above or below the sea surface.
The waves roared ashore in the darkness, barely a half-hour later. And at more than 4.8 metres, the tallest was more than five times what officials initially had reported.
Indonesia, an archipelago with 127 active volcanoes and frequent earthquakes, has suffered from deadly tsunamis repeatedly over the years, including two in the past four months.
Despite scientific advances in early detection of tsunamis, the country remains especially vulnerable. And it has no way of detecting precisely the kind of tsunami scientists suspect was generated Saturday — from a landslide, caused by a volcanic eruption, which displaced an enormous amount of seawater that ambushed many thousands of unsuspecting Indonesians ashore.
“There was no evacuation,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the spokesperson for Indonesia’s disaster management agency, told reporters Tuesday in unusually blunt terms. “The communities had no chance to evacuate.”
Sutopo was also frank about the reason.
“There was no tsunami early warning because we, Indonesia, do not have a tsunami early warning system that is triggered by undersea landslides and volcanic eruptions,” he said.
Indonesia’s worst tsunami in modern times was the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, which left about 200,000 people dead or missing in northern Sumatra.
After the disaster, Indonesia took steps to prevent a recurrence, including construction of evacuation towers in Aceh, the hardest-hit province, and the establishment of a tsunami warning system. Completed in 2008, it consists of seismographic sensors, buoys, tidal gauges and GPS.
But the warning system is costly to maintain and parts of it have fallen into disrepair — including the buoys, which were designed to detect sea level changes and transmit the information electronically to a data centre that could alert local authorities to a tsunami danger.
When an earthquake set off the deadly tsunami that struck the island of Sulawesi in September, killing 2,100 people, no data was received from the buoys.
And warnings triggered by the system’s seismographic sensors could only be disseminated haphazardly because some cellphone transmission towers had been toppled by the quake.
Damin said he had been alert to the possibility that the eruption Saturday meant danger for his fishing village.
He was watching the sea about a half-hour after he heard the frightening noise.
That is when he saw the first wave of a tsunami approaching. He began running with his wife and mother for higher ground.
“I dragged my wife and mother,” he said. “Run fast! Go! Hurry!” he recalled shouting at them.
A second wave, much larger, caught up with them as they ran. It swept them away, but they managed to reach safety.
When they returned to their home near the beach, there was nothing left.
“It wiped out my house and all the things in it,” he said.
At least 429 people died and nearly 1,500 were injured in the Sunda Strait tsunami, which struck western Java and southern Sumatra.
The number of casualties was high in part because many people were at the beach enjoying a long holiday weekend.
But officials acknowledge that many lives could have been saved if the country had an adequate tsunami warning system.
Even with its flaws, the existing system can detect tsunamis caused by seismic activity.
But the system is not set up to detect tsunamis caused by volcanic activity, even though the threat is well understood by scientists and the technology for detecting them exists.