January 3, 2005

We landed in Medan on the northwest coast of Sumatra. I’m with a National Geographic sponsored production company  They’ve done an excellent job of logistical support. There are three vans to meet us with a support team of 8 people. The objective is to drive the coast road from Medan to Banda Aceh, the hardest hit region from the tsunami. I may be the first scientist to get in, so I owe them a lot for letting me tag along.

We’re off the plane and Dan, the National Geographic fixer is in control of the logistics. He gets us hustled through customs and out to the waiting vans without a hitch.

Driving out of Medan takes over an hour due to the traffic. The city chaos gradually subsides, and the teeming streets give way to small country roads. The area is still heavily populated however, just less cars.

Several hours driving eventually gets us to the town of Idi. There is a bridge over a good sized river with many brightly coloured boats. A few are sunk. We stop while the film crew shoots some scenes. I use the chance to ask the boat men if the tsunami surge came up the river. They say it did and that it sunk several boats here and further upstream. The total surge height was estimated at about 1 m. The locals say It was worse at the beach.

We took the long bumpy beach road a few km out to the coast. It was a lot worse. The water penetrated inland several hundred meters. Destroyed several of the front row houses. A prawn hatchery is on the front row, but the locals say the water didn’t spill into the prawn tanks. OI took data while Nat Geo filmed. It took a while, and we didn’t leave until dark. We still had 95 km to go to the town where we intended to sleep.

While driving at night in Mexico is a bad idea, mostly because of the occasional bandito or a herd of cows sleeping in the road, here in northern Sumatra Ace Province, the problem is armed separatist rebels, and it is very real. I asked about the supposed cease-fire as a result of the tsunami, and the locals are all kind of like ‘yeah right…’. But the stretch of road we have to run is considered safe and we go for it. No problems and we make it to a hotel in Lhokseumave and stop for the night. There are armed patrols around town, and it is clear there are a lot of guns around.

January 4, 2005

We woke at 5:3 am to news that rebels had attacked a convoy to the north , but they were shot back by the Indonesian Army. We load up and set up our gear for the day and we’re off by 6:30. A long day of driving. Our first stop was the town of Panteraja. The crew filmed as I did some interviews and measured the tsunami inundation. The surge was so large, I could only shoot a transect up to the road, after which I had to go by GPS. The inundation distance was too big, extending completely across the rice fields.

After Panteraja we drove on and stopped for lunch at the next big town on the coast. After that it was the windy part of the road through the mountains where the rebels live before getting Banda Aceh.

Coming into Banda Aceh was amazing. A slow decent into the “warzone”. It was unbelievable, at the central mosque, some 3 km from the ocean, there was debris, and mud everywhere. The wind was blowing very strong then there was dust everywhere.

But what we saw at the mosque was nothing compared to what we would see near the waterfront. The tsunami just completely destroyed this part of the city. Everything was flattened. Boats were twisted and smashed on the side of the bridge; piles of debris 30 feet high. Bodies, so many bodies were visible and there must have been many, many more that I didn’t see, but I could smell. I walked around with the film crew and just observed. There really wasn’t much I could do. I made estimates of flow depth and took gps positions at those points. Every time I turned around there was something else amazing to see. You would look at a pile of debris  and it would take a few moments before you realised a big fishing boat was sticking out of it.

One of the support vans had gone ahead and set up camp in Banda Aceh. The base camp is at the media compound at the governor’s palace in the middle of town.

The place was a bit crazy; all the big news organizations were there. CBS, CNN, Fox etc… I did a few interviews as a ‘tsunami scientist’.

The local crew had the camp expertly set up and prepared a good meal for us. After getting to sleep relatively early, we were awakened by a strong after shock (M 6.2) at about 2 am. Due to the effects of the sleeping pills, I noticed, but barely woke up.

January 5, 2005

I did the morning in Banda Aceh. I walked from the town centre as far out towards the coast as I could. I was with Gunawar (our security guy, a former officer in Indonesian Army special forces) and looked for flow marks on buildings. Every now and then, we would be come across a body. The whole scene was incredibly heavy. We walked back towards the river and met up with the film crew. A squad of Indonesian Amy showed up and got to work pulling bodies out of the rubble.

In the afternoon I was able to get away with a van and two support guys (Gunawan and Jackie) to make it out to the open seaside of Sumatra. Here the wave was even bigger than in Banda Aceh. The very first bridge near the coast was completely destroyed. The locals had constructed a raft from oil barrels and wooden planks, and we pulled ourselves across. In the distance I could see a jetty with a large freighter turned over on it’s side. We decided to walk as far as we could towards it. The views were incredible. Every building was just gone. Huge Casuarina trees were uprooted and  scattered around like toothpicks. The ones that were standing had the bark stripped off to around the 10 m mark. There was one stand of trees that had been snapped off uniformly at about 5 m above ground level. This puzzled me at first, but now I think it is because of the large coal barge that was swept across the trees and snapped them all off.

Oh yeah, the barge. A 100 ft coal barge with tugboat still attached was grounded at the base of the coastal bluff some 500 m inland form the water line. The coal had been swept off the deck and a section of the deck railing had been peeled off and was dangling in the landward side of the barge. The mountain side on this area which had previously been covered with dense forest to the beach level was completely denuded and the topsoil had been removed down to bare rock. I estimate the trim line to be between 20 and 25 m across the entire area from the barge to the cement factory.

We walked on to the cement factory and talked to some people who had set up a relief/rescue camp, although I’m not sure what they were doing as there were no people around to relieve or rescue. Maybe they we helping to mode survivors back to the relief camps closer to Banda Aceh.

That night a bigger aftershock hit the area, but due to exhaustion and sleeping pills, I totally slept through it. The Indonesians said they tried to wake us up, but none of the drugged up sleeping Americans even moved!

January 6, 2005

Today I headed east toward a ferry port and an oil transfer facility at Kreung Raya about 45 km to the west of Banda Aceh. We surveyed the port and one location along the way. On the way back, I stepped out to take a photo of a collapsed building and nearly tripped over a body wrapped in plastic. This was and outlying area and the recovery crews had not come through yet to pick up the dead. They must have been working through the day however since in the morning driving out to the port, the side of the road had only a few body bags, but when we were driving back later that afternoon the number increased 10-fold with piles of bodies wrapped in black plastic at each intersection waiting to be picked up.

We made it back to the camp by noon, had a quick lunch then went out to the Lhoknga area (where the barge was) to try and accurately measure the height of the trim line on the hillside. I estimated it was 20-25 m but I wanted to get a solid data pint.

We were running a bit late to meet the film crew and found them on the road out there. They flagged us down and gave us the story:

While waiting at the ferry crossing, they heard gunfire. A squad of Indonesian army had engaged with some Acehnese rebels and were sweeping up the beach. The camera crew moved back and started working another story. A few minutes later the conflict moved close to them again and the Army troops began arresting locals suspected of being Acehnese rebels. By the time I caught up with the film crew, they looked pretty shaken up.

The rest of the afternoon was spent out at the waterfront. I was disappointed at not being able to measure the runup at Lhoknga. I did measurements out at the waterfront, but it was rather redundant work. I waited around while the film crew shot a story segment with some survivors, then I tagged along while they went with the survivors to a relief camp in the search for lost friends and family. While it probably would make good television, it was rather unproductive scientifically. I was hoping that the next day I would be able to get on a flight with a relief helicopter to access more points on the open west coast where the tsunami heights were the largest.

January 7, 2005

I was up early trying to figure out what to do to save the mission. Without at least one more data point on the west coast, the ‘scientific’ part of the trip was rather weak. Two points on the east coast, a bunch of flow depths and pictures in Banda Aceh plus one speculative point at Lhoknga on the west just wasn’t enough. A detailed map of the inundation in Banda Aceh could be done with what I had, but I needed a good base map and that seemed very hard to come by. The aerial photos could be purchased, and I had GPS-ed most of the photo locations, so that was a plus, but it didn’t seem ‘meaty’ enough for a good paper.

Luck was on my side today. We go out to the airport at about 7:30 am. There were already flights going in and out taking food and water to cut off villages. I checked in with someone from the US Military and he directed me to a person in charge of getting journalists on helicopter flights. At first the line seemed hopelessly long, and I was way down on the list. Luckily, some of the translators had not shown up for work that day and we were able to hop on an earlier flight. This was because Gunawan, my Indonesian security guard, volunteered to do the necessary translating for the flight crew. We were in the air by 8:15 am and heading south along the west coast over the most tsunami devastated areas.

Looking at the damage from the air has so much more impact, you really get a sense of the immense scale of the tragedy and the disaster. All along the west coast a neat trim line could be seen where the trees near the shoreline were simply removed from the waterline to who-knows-how high, 10 m at least, more like 20 or 30 m.

We landed about half an hour, and I scrambled out of the chopper to measure three quick transects across the inundation zone in about 15 minutes before getting back on the helicopter. We stopped once more at a place further inland, and I helped carry supplies to the relief camp. After that we returned to Banda Aceh arriving around 10:30 am.

The second stroke of luck that day was when a guy from a relief group out of Singapore gifted me a large fold-up map of Banda Aceh. This turned out to be very helpful for plotting my data and producing an inundation map of the event.

January 8, 2005

The last day was spent mapping more flow depths. I was out towards the western part of the city. We then shifted back towards the east and mapped the inundation extents while the file crew finished up their work. In the late afternoon we packed up and hopped a Garuda flight out of Banda Aceh to Jakarta.