December 27, 2024
BANDA ACEH – As Aceh commemorates 20 years since the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands in the province, authorities are striving to ensure that people are better prepared when future disasters come knocking at the door.
The magnitude 9.2 earthquake triggered huge waves that swept into Aceh to the shock of its unsuspecting residents. Previously, the most recent tsunami that the province had experienced was nearly a century before, when a tsunami hit Simeulue Island off the southern coast of Aceh in 1907 and killed 400.
A region prone to natural disasters, Aceh had recorded at least three tsunamis that hit the province before the 1907 tsunami: in 1394, 1450 and 1861. Layers of sand deposits in the Ek Leuntie cave in Meusanah Lhok, Aceh Besar regency show traces of tsunamis that go back as far as 7,500 years ago.
But due to the long intervals between the tsunamis, authorities find it hard to keep the focus of all concerned parties, locally or nationally, on bolstering Aceh’s disaster mitigation.
“Tsunamis, earthquakes and other geological disasters are tough [to handle] because they have a long cycle. Big earthquakes alone have an average of 100 to 200 years in Indonesia,” National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) director for disaster risk mapping and evaluation Udrekh told The Jakarta Post.
“This is what makes disaster management difficult, the collective memory of Aceh people cannot [recall] the events, since they take longer to happen than our lifespan,” he said.
Better alert system
For authorities, the 2004 tsunami was a wake-up call to build better alert systems.
Indonesia has since armed provinces across the country with up-to-date tsunami early warning systems (INATWS) and approximately 533 seismographs to better detect potential natural disasters.
Read also: Siren rings as Aceh mourners mark 20 years after deadly tsunami
“We did not have sufficient technology in 2004 to deliver information about a massive earthquake. It required a broader seismology system,” said Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) director for earthquakes and tsunamis Daryono.
He said the country now had a better ability to predict tsunamis by generating models from existing data, and that information can be sent quickly to hundreds of warning receiver systems (WRS) that are spread among regional agencies.
The receivers allow earthquake and tsunami alerts to be sent straight to mobile phones as text messages, a system that Aceh people did not have during the 2004 tsunami.
“Ease of information today matters. I now receive disaster alerts on my phone. Twenty years ago, we didn’t even know a tsunami had happened in Aceh until days later,” said Adi Warsidi, a journalist based in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh.
Aceh currently has 28 earthquake monitors called SeisComp to detect an earthquake’s location, magnitude and potential for tsunamis, according to Andi Azhar, who heads the BMKG geophysics station in Aceh Besar.
The station is responsible for alerting people of earthquakes below magnitude 5, while the national station must handle the bigger earthquakes.
“We initially sent out warnings five minutes after an earthquake. But learning from the 2018 Palu earthquake [and its subsequent tsunami], such a five-minute warning did not give enough time for people [to evacuate]. Now, with our current technology, we can issue alerts in under three minutes,” Andi said.
More than just early warnings
Despite improvements in disaster warning, mitigation programs are not yet enough to prevent mass casualties from a potential tsunami that experts believe might return sometime in the future.
Twenty years on since the Boxing Day tsunami, evacuation signs and sirens are seen on the main roads across Aceh. But geophysicist and disaster mitigation professor Nazli Ismail at the Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh said they did not always work. He pointed to one incident in 2012 when the sirens did not go off when an earthquake hit Aceh.
Read also: The devastating 2004 tsunami: a timeline
Nazli also said Aceh does not yet have what he describes as “infrastructural awareness”, as many buildings are still easily damaged by earthquakes.
“Earthquakes do not kill people; falling buildings and debris do. That’s particularly true in a tsunami, where victims are usually killed by hard materials,” he said.
Local and national disaster agencies, and many schools, hold drills every year.
But Yudhie Satria of the Aceh Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPBA) said that awareness campaigns in general are still at a bare minimum, not enough to make people “internalize mitigation awareness as part of their everyday lives.”
“This dissemination for Aceh residents should not just be taught, but integrated into our culture,” he said.
He pointed to a local wisdom of Simeulue people in Aceh called smong, a narrative about tsunamis that was passed down through generations through songs and bedtime stories after the 1907 tsunami. Smong teaches people to escape to safety in the event of big earthquakes that are followed by receding seawater.
When the 2004 tsunami hit Aceh, Simeulue people alerted each other by shouting “smong!” and managed to quickly evacuate due to the ingrained wisdom. Only six died out of the regency’s 70,000 residents, and they were killed by the earthquake and not the tsunami.
Aceh journalist Yayan Zamzami suggests that tsunami awareness campaigns should better cater to the youth using their social media lingo.
“Everyone’s on their phones now, so why don’t we slowly imbue the importance of evacuation through TikTok videos or other platforms?” she said.
Nationally, Indonesia is “still far behind” the international agreement of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction to build back better in 15 years, said Udrekh of the BNPB, adding that the mid-term review found that Indonesia “failed nearly all aspects” of the mitigation, partly due to the increasing unpredictability of natural disasters.
What the country sorely needs, he said, is more comprehensive education for Indonesians regarding disaster mitigation.
“We see it in Japan, in their citizens’ collective knowledge of what to do when natural disaster strikes, it is a factor of their evacuation success,” Udrekh said.
“We Indonesians, actually are not a difficult nation to teach, we just need to go about our local and daily routines better,” he added.