Indonesia 4

Over the last few days I've had the privileged, but confronting experience to visit some of the most affected areas from the disasters that hit Sulawesi. I use the plural 'disasters' because, as many of you know, there were multiple earthquakes, a tsunami and a liquefaction event. For those unfamiliar with liquefaction, it is when saturated or partially saturated soil substantially loses strength and stiffness in response to an applied stress - such as shaking during an earthquake - and in which material that is ordinarily a solid behaves like a liquid.

In other words, solid ground becomes liquid and swallows up things, moves things etc. This clip from BBC Indonesia does a good job of showing this as it happened in Palu despite the language barrier - I stood yesterday at the break in the road shown at 0:50

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e32Fz1Tg3ng

There was a place where we saw a house that was moved 100m from where it originally stood and was left resting on top of another house, on top of a third house that had sunk in the mud.

In another place where we stood there was still a three story high landslide of mud waiting to be cleared. It had gone through an area where there was a hospital. We also drove to the beach front to see the once bustling seashore abandoned - along with everything within about 200m of the new coastline (the water is much higher now than it was pre-tsunami).

My colleague Nyoman and I spoke at length about how scary it must have been. Where do you run, if you are actually lucky enough to see it coming. We compared it to Deep Impact, the movie. You watch the comet hit the earth, all of the tsunami action start and people run... they look almost silly running away from the oncoming wave.... but in the end: Where do you run to? Left, right? Away from the mud or wave, out of the path - if you can define the path?

It must have been petrifying.

Here are some shots. They are not mine. I don't take many photos these days when I'm in these sort of places - it seems irreverent.

To contrast this experience, last night four of us attended a "Volunteer Appreciation Night" that was put on by the local disaster coordination group. It included a testimonial from a worker at UNICEF thanking the local volunteers and those that had come into Palu to assist, and also a testimonial from a lady who had lost six members of her family through the liquefaction event. I couldn't believe the strength she showed as she spoke to us.

I also stood in awe and amazement of the whole group that were there as they actually celebrated the recovery so far with great music and free coffee (highly Islamic area so no alcohol) (and by free coffee I mean sugar syrup and milk that someone waved the coffee beans towards).