An excellent article in The New Yorker: Why the Tsunami in Indonesia Struck Without Warning. Excerpt:
Even as Indonesian authorities struggled to respond to the aftermath of the disaster, they endured withering criticism for failing to adequately prepare Palu beforehand. Indonesia’s tsunami-warning system employs more than a hundred tidal-gauge sensors, but none were close enough to Palu to pick up the localized wave.
Authorities had issued a tsunami warning for the area, based off readings from seismographic sensors, but Gavin Sullivan, an associate professor at Coventry University who studies disaster preparation and recovery in Indonesia, told me, “Many people at the beach and on the [bayside] road had no idea the wave was coming at all.”
The city is equipped with tsunami sirens, but the earthquake had knocked out their power, meaning that residents, such as the man on the parking deck, had to shout warnings themselves. A text-message alert also system failed to activate, because many cell-phone towers had already been destroyed.
“There was a chance for the Indonesian government to be better prepared for disasters like this,” Louise Comfort, a disaster-management expert at the University of Pittsburgh who leads a project to help Indonesia prepare for tsunamis, said. “That makes the current devastation all the more heartbreaking.”
At a press conference, Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, a spokesman for the Indonesian disaster-management board, said, “The threat of disasters increases, disasters increase, but the budget decreases.” (A 6.9-magnitude earthquake killed more than four hundred and sixty people on islands southwest of Sulawesi, in August.) He acknowledged that he had found out about the Palu tsunami through social media and TV.
“Indonesia is a developing country, and it is difficult to allocate the resources, but we have to be ready for the worst-case scenario,” Saut Sagala, a professor at the Bandung Institute of Technology and a senior fellow at the Indonesian Resilience Development Initiative, said. One dire possibility is an earthquake or tsunami striking the greater metropolitan area of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, where about twenty-eight million people strain an already overburdened infrastructure.
“If the government does not invest more on disaster risk reduction and increase the preparedness of the communities, we will not be ready for these disasters,” Sagala said.
Among other things, he said, the government should work to educate the population about disaster preparedness, retrofit buildings with seismic-shock absorbers, stockpile resources, and use city planning to steer people away from vulnerable areas.
The Indonesian populations that are best prepared for disasters, Sagala added, are those that have already suffered one.
