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 By Harry PEARL Carita, Indonesia (AFP) Dec 25, 2018
Desperately-needed aid flowed into a stretch of Indonesia's tsunami-struck coastline Tuesday, but humanitarian workers warned that clean water and medicine supplies were dwindling as thousands crammed makeshift evacuation centres. Fears about a public health crisis come as the death toll from Saturday's volcano-triggered disaster rose to nearly 400 with thousands more displaced from flattened homes. "A lot of the children are sick with fevers, headaches and they haven't had enough water," said Rizal Alimin, a doctor working for NGO Aksi Cepat Tanggap, at a local school that was turned into a temporary shelter. "We have less medicine than usual... It's not healthy here for evacuees. There isn't enough clean water. They need food and people are sleeping on the floor." The powerful tsunami struck at night and without warning, sweeping over popular beaches on southern Sumatra and western Java and inundated tourist hotels and coastal settlements. The latest death toll stood at 397, with 1,021 people injured and another 77 missing. Experts have warned that more deadly waves could slam the stricken region. Many of the more than 5,000 evacuees are too afraid to return home, fearing another disaster. "I've been here three days," said Neng Sumarni, 40, who was sleeping with her three children and husband on the school's floor with some three dozen others. "I'm scared because my home is right near the beach." - 'Can't reach them' - Abu Salim, with volunteer group Tagana, said aid workers were scrambling to stabilise the situation. "Today we're focusing on helping the evacuees in shelters by setting up public kitchens and distributing logistics and more tents in suitable places," he told AFP on Tuesday. "(People) still don't have access to running water... There are many evacuees who fled to higher ground and we still can't reach them." Aid was flowing in mainly by road while two government boats were on their way to several islands near the Sumatran coast to help dozens of marooned residents. Officials have said the evidence suggested that an eruption at the rumbling Anak Krakatoa volcano in the Sunda Strait -- between Java and Sumatra -- caused a section of the crater to collapse and slide into the ocean, triggering the tsunami. Unlike those caused by earthquakes, which usually trigger alert systems, volcano-triggered tsunamis give authorities very little time to warn residents of the impending threat. Indonesia's disaster agency initially said there was no tsunami threat at all, even as the killer wave crashed ashore. It was later forced to issue a correction and an apology as it pointed to a lack of early warning systems for the high death toll. Disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said on Monday: "The lack of a tsunami early warning system caused a lot of victims because people did not have the time to evacuate." Meanwhile, rescue teams were using their bare hands, diggers and other heavy equipment to haul debris from the stricken area and hunt for corpses, as hopes of finding more survivors dwindle. The tsunami was Indonesia's third major natural disaster in six months, following a series of powerful earthquakes on the island of Lombok in July and August and a quake-tsunami in September that killed around 2,200 people in Palu on Sulawesi island, with thousands more missing and presumed dead. It also came less than a week before the 14th anniversary of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, one of the deadliest disasters in history that killed some 220,000 people in countries around the Indian Ocean, including some 168,000 Indonesians. The vast archipelago nation is one of the most disaster-hit nations on Earth due to its position straddling the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates collide.
No warning meant no escape from Indonesia tsunami The killer wave struck tourist beaches and low-lying settlements on both sides of the Sunda Strait with devastating force on Saturday night, catching both residents and disaster monitors totally unawares. In a series of tweets later deleted with a stricken apology, the national disaster agency had stated there was "no tsunami threat" even as the wave crashed over parts of southern Sumatra and the western tip of Java. "The lack of an early warning system is why the tsunami was not detected," acknowledged disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho. "Signs that a tsunami was coming weren't detected and so people did not have time to evacuate," he added. Indonesia is one of the most disaster-prone nations on Earth due to its position straddling the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates collide. A quake-tsunami that struck Palu on Sulawesi island in September killed around 2,200 people, with thousands more missing and presumed dead. Tide-monitoring stations and data-modelling are the main tools Indonesia monitoring agencies use to predict tsunamis -- usually in the wake of an earthquake. But even if all the country's stations are working, the network is recognised to be limited and in any case gives people little time to flee as they only detect waves once they are close to shore. Efforts to improve systems have been beset by problems, from a failure to properly maintain new equipment to bureaucratic bickering. Experts say Saturday's disaster was most likely caused by a moderate eruption of the Anak Krakatoa volcano in the Sunda Strait that triggered either a large and very fast moving flow of molten rock into the sea or a sudden and massive submarine landslide. In either case, large volumes of water would have been displaced, resulting in a tsunami. - No time to run - "Such triggers would not have been detected by Indonesia's tsunami early warning system because that is geared-up to detect earthquake-triggered tsunamis," said Richard Teeuw, a disaster risk reduction expert at the University of Portsmouth in England. "The night-time occurrence of the tsunami would have added to the chaos, with little chance of seeing the incoming tsunami wave and running to safety," Teeuw said. And the fact that Anak Krakatoa had been displaying significant activity for months, meant that Saturday's minor eruption would have sparked no particular cause for alarm. After the catastrophic Indian Ocean quake-tsunami in 2004, Indonesia deployed a number of early-warning marine buoys to detect tsunamis, but Nugroho said they had been out of action for the past six years. "Vandalism, limited budgets and technical issues are the reasons why we currently don't have tsunami buoys," he said. "We must rebuild them to strengthen Indonesia's Tsunami Early Warning System." Such buoys are normally deployed along underwater tectonic plate boundaries -- the focus again on detecting earthquake-generated tsunamis rather than those triggered by volcanic activity. David Rothery, a professor of planetary geosciences at Britain's Open University, noted that a blanket deployment of buoys would still have a limited warning impact if the tsunami was generated close to the shore. "Even if there had been such a buoy right next to Anak Krakatau, this is so close to the affected shorelines that warning time would have been minimal given the high speeds at which tsunami waves travel," Rothery said.
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