Indonesia: Tsunami prone: Tsunami-fear shakes Indonesia again, now ...

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The tsunami-struck countries and particularly Indonesia have been cawt in a strange mult-factoral weave, of which the tosses-and-turns of Mother Nature are only a part. Here's an overview, beginning with a report from Assocaited Press (Jul30,2k6) with some fast forward and backtracking from here:

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Within weeks of the devastating 2004 quake and tsunami, governments across the Indian Ocean vowed to establish a warning system that would protect their coastal residents from another disaster.

But progress has been slowed by bickering over which country should host a regional tsunami alert center and technical problems with deep-sea monitoring buoys.

Governments also have come under fire for failing to educate citizens about the threat of killer waves, bolster coastal infrastructure, and establish ways to pass along warnings to remote villages -- something that cost Indonesia hundreds of lives just two weeks ago.

On Monday, Aug7,2k6, more than 150 regional officials, aid workers and donors gather on Indonesia's resort island of Bali to discuss the US$126 million (euro100 million) Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning and Mitigation System.

Asian Pacific, Pacific & Islands > Indonesia:

They hope to come away from the U.N. meeting with a timeline for implementing the network -- at least two years away -- and detailed plans from the 27 affected countries for disseminating alerts and evacuating the public.

In the meantime, while the UN and 27 countries in the warning-scheme are negotiating over the technical aspect of the alert system and who will derive power from it, the people of the area have other concerns on their minds.

Besides bickering bureaucrats wanting to dominate the technics of tsunami alerts for the region, Tom McCawley reporting for CSM, "Indonesians ask if calamities are a divine rebuke" (Jul24,2k6):

Shockwaves from the string of natural disasters over the past 19 months, including numerous earthquakes, two tsunamis, and an imminent volcanic eruption, have reached even Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the state palace.

Irked by nationwide whisperings that the calamities were a divine statement against his rule, Mr. Yudhoyono told state meteorologists Thursday to explain the science behind the disasters on radio and television.

"Superstition and mysticism is a factor in Indonesia," says Dino Patti Djalal, a presidential spokesman. "But it's the last thing we need when facing natural disasters."

The giant Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 that struck 11 countries seemed to leave in its wake a series of natural disasters. Since then, Indonesia has faced deadly floods, landslides, and parching droughts. One week ago Monday an earthquake struck off the coast of Java island, leaving at least 668 dead. Sunday, a 6.1 magnitude quake off Sulawesi island sent coastal residents fleeing inland - but no tsunami materialized.

In the scramble to explain the apparent wrath of nature, science is jostling against religion and even supernatural beliefs. National newspapers have carried full front-page color diagrams of the crashing tectonic plates beneath the 17,000-island Indonesian archipelago. On the editorial pages, writers have called for "national introspection," quoting religious leaders calling for repentance.

The president's political opponents, such as the well-known soothsayer Permadi, have eagerly spread the notion of a divine warning. Speaking on Metro-TV Wednesday, he warned that the president was angering nature. "He [the president] has 'hot hands' which are causing these calamities," said Permadi, a legislator in the national parliament. In the late 1990s, Permadi, of Yudhoyono's rival political party the PDI-P, also foretold that aliens in UFOs would arrive to save Earth.

The AP> report recounts the Java situation in the context of the technics of the warning-system at the center of the Asian countries' bickering among themselves:

The July 17 tsunami that killed 600 people on the Indonesian island of Java adds a sense of urgency to the three-day conference.

Two regional agencies issued bulletins warning that a powerful earthquake could spawn destructive waves, but Indonesian officials did not pass them on to local communities in time. And with no sirens on the beaches, it would have been difficult to alert the public even if they had.

"We have the information but now we have to make sure that information is fully available to the people at risk," said Patricio Bernal, the director of the U.N's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

But, he noted, many positive things have happened in the last 18 months.

There are now 23 monitoring stations across the Indian Ocean that can quickly measure the strength of underwater quakes and assess the tsunami threat. That information is sent to the Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center and the Japanese Meteorological Agency, which then relay it to individual countries at risk.

Progress on a nation-by-nation basis, however, has been inconsistent.

Some [countries] -- most notably Thailand, Malaysia and India -- have set up tsunami warning centers to field information, and Australia also plans one. Thailand has also installed an alert system along the Andaman Coast, complete with sirens and evacuation routes.

Indonesia, on the other hand, is still struggling to set up dozens of tidal gauges, seismometers and deep-ocean tsunami monitoring buoys, despite help from the Germans.

While it has said the system will be up and running by mid-2008, only two of 22 buoys have been installed -- and they are under repair after breaking from their moorings. The government only announced plans Friday to build elevated safety zones along the coast and held evacuation drills in two towns across its 6,000 inhabited islands.

The immediate challenge for most of the region, though, is agreeing on who should assess data and determine when to issue a tsunami warning. Eight countries want to set up their own centers, something experts say could pave the way for unnecessary confusion.

"If you have eight different pieces of information going to all the 27 countries and contrasting with one another, then nobody knows what to do," said Curt Barrett, of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Other potential pitfalls include a shortage of the deep-sea buoys -- only a handful of suppliers exist worldwide -- and financing the maintenance of the system over the long-term.

Time, too, remains a hurdle. While countries like Sri Lanka and the Maldives may have hours to prepare for an alert, some parts of Indonesia would have minutes -- a situation that Bernal described as a "huge challenge."

Take the town of Padang off the coast of Sumatra. Kerry Sieh, a California Institute of Technology seismologist, has forecast that it will be hit by a massive earthquake in the next 30 years that will spawn waves up to 12 meters (39 feet) high.

With less than a half hour to escape, Sieh and others said a high-tech warning system will do little good. What could save residents, he said, is simply learning where and when to run when the quake hits and having the necessary escape routes to flee.

"Here are a million people along the Sumatran coast. You are giving them a warning that will do them no good," Sieh said. "If they have been educated, if there is emergency response prepared and the infrastructure has been changed a bit, they will have taken care of the issue.

"They will run if they can."

But the people's deeper quandries have to emerge, themselves like an erupting volcanoe of ignorance, superstitution, reflection on the fragility of human existence, a h+tened awareness of corruption in h+ places, recourse to religious values when perplexed by the stew of natural disaster and societal disorder and religious claims and counter-claims. McCawley continues:

According to the Indonesian Survey Institute (LSI), a national polling agency, the president has reason to be worried. The LSI released a survey in July based on a sample of 440 people in earthquake-afflicted Yogyakarta concluding that the public had begun to interpret the natural disasters "mystically, irrationally, or spiritually."

The survey concluded that 78.1 percent of those polled believed the disasters were a "warning from nature to Indonesia." The LSI's executive director, Denny Ali, said to reporters that the president's political opponents were indeed pushing the idea that he had helped trigger the disasters.

"In Indonesia, people believe in the supernatural," says Muhammad Qodary, an LSI researcher. "And the more people believe [the disasters] don't come from scientific explanations, the more they'll look to the supernatural."

Mr. Qodary says that those polled tended to explain the natural disasters based on either religious or pantheistic beliefs.

Divine warning for sins?

Gendut Irianto, a Muslim and car salesman in Jakarta, is turning to his faith for explanations. "I think the earthquake was definitely a warning from God to all Indonesians so we should chant and pray for forgiveness." He adding that "although Java supposedly has mystical protection from Nyi Roro Kidul, [the spirit-queen of the South Seas], nothing could protect us from the holy wrath for our sins."

Henri Siregar, a Catholic business executive in his 30s, says, "The earthquake is a warning to the central government." Decrying Indonesia's widespread corruption, Mr. Siregar says: "I think a lot of people are screwed up. Of course we'll get a slap on the wrist [from God]."

Not all are convinced. "The earthquake was just a natural phenomena, not a sign that nature or God was angry," says Tonie Tanu, a music producer in Jakarta. Among the skeptics is the president himself, who aides say described predictions of omens of his downfalls as "rubbish."

Palace officials said that Yudhoyono, himself a devout Muslim, confirmed that the May 27 earthquake in Yogyakarta was indeed a sign, but "of Indonesia sitting on top of unstable tectonic plates."

Dr. Fauzi, a US trained geophysicist who monitors earthquakes for the Indonesian government, says that science and religion did not necessarily contradict each other. "You can see it purely on a scientific level. We rest on tectonic plates," he says, "but God created them. We can study nature and understand it, but if we misuse it, the Koran - and the Bible - can tell us the consequences."

In Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority country, all citizens by law must subscribe to at least one of five state-sanctioned religions.

Pantheism endures in Indonesia

Aside from the 88 percent Muslim majority, Indonesia has Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists. But religions imported in the past 1,000 years have in many places blended with pantheistic beliefs and nature worship. Qodari, who helped research the LSI survey, believes pantheism may be strongest on the most populous island of Java.

The spiritual caretaker of the Merapi volcano in central Java, an octogenarian known as M'bah Maridjan, showed the strength of such beliefs in May when he chose to defy orders from the government - and warnings from seismologists - and remain in his house on the mountain's smoldering slopes.

Hundreds of villagers chose to follow Mr. Maridjan's example, angering some scientists who warned of an imminent eruption. Maridjan, instead, chose to pray and lead a procession up the mountain, claiming that he was told by a nearby sultan, the late Hamengkubuwono IX, to guard the volcano and take care of the villagers.

Maridjan's credibility jumped after the government relaxed its alert warning in June, allowing thousands of villagers to return to their homes.

Both the continuing efforts to cobble together an effective technical tsunami-alert system, and the upheaval in values about God, Nature, and Human corruption, come in the wake of the most recent recovery from the second actual tsunami, which prevents us from forgetting the destruction and human suffering that had come again so suddenly. On Jul21,2k5, CSM's Michael J. Coren reported, "Tsunami responders primed by recent calamities -- Relief groups say survivors are getting enough aid, at least in the emergency's initial stages."

PANGANDARAN, INDONESIA – Hundreds of police, military, and relief workers continued to clear debris as well as retrieve and bury the dead three days after a tsunami struck this once idyllic coastal resort town.

Each night, survivors crowd into camps that hold thousands of people. Some return during the day to scavenge in the ruins of their homes. Salt water has contaminated many wells and made drinking water a precious commodity.

So far, say relief groups in Pangandaran, no shortages of food or medicine have been reported and survivors are receiving enough aid, at least in the emergency's initial stages.

"I think we just need a few more days time here and things will be settled," says Herman Widjaja, a member of the Buddhist aid organization Tzu Chi. "Especially nowadays, the new government is really taking care of these matters.... They're coordinated quite well."

The limited scale of the disaster, and easy access for relief supplies, have helped rescuers in comparison to the deadly 2004 tsunami that killed more than 170,000 people in Indonesia or the recent Yogyakarta earthquake that leveled 150,000 homes and killed about 5,000 people. In both cases, the vast area of the devastation areas complicated humanitarian efforts.

Officials reported the death toll from Monday's tsunami as 531, with more than 270 others missing on the southern coast of the island of Java. Twenty-three more bodies were uncovered on Thursday.

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake in the Indian Ocean touched off the rushing wall of water - by some estimates as high as 20 feet. Residents barely noticed the tremor until a roaring wave engulfed the town 45 minutes later, sweeping 1,600 feet inland and crashing against some 110 miles of Indonesia's shoreline.

The recent string of natural disasters has kept relief organization well-stocked and primed to distribute aid quickly. In Pangandaran, the relief group Save the Children says it will hand over aid work to local authorities once the emergency passes.

"Most organizations including our own are using donated funds and have not launched international appeals ," says Jon Bugge, spokesman for Save the Children in Indonesia."We feel once the emergency relief is settled, the local government can take the lead on local reconstruction."

These countries are among those definitely in harms way of the outcomes of the crunching of undersea techtonic plates that produce tsunamis: Thailand, Malaysia, India, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka,Maldives

-- Owlb

Futher Information

Students watched smoke rise from the Mount Merapi volcano in Pakem, Indonesia, last month (Jun16,2k6). Photo: SLAMET RIYADI/REUTERS CSM (Aug3,2k6)