Fourteen years ago, Indonesia suffered one of the deadliest disasters in modern history, a 9.1-magnitude earthquake that unleashed a sixty-foot wall of water that killed approximately a hundred and seventy thousand people, many of them in the northern province of Aceh.
In the years following, the government invested in preparing for the next catastrophe. In 2008, a disaster-management board was created, which, with the help of foreign governments, including Germany and the United States, built an early-warning system for tsunamis, made up of twenty-two sensor-laden buoys, which cost half a million dollars each and went online the following year.
Soon, schools of fish began gathering in the electric fields emitted by the buoys’ computers, which drew fishermen, some of whom scrapped the equipment for copper wiring. Other sensors fell into disrepair after funding cuts led to poor maintenance. In 2016, an earthquake in western Indonesia, near Aceh, revealed that none of the buoys worked anymore.
An early warning system that might have prevented deaths in the recent Indonesian tsunami has been stalled in the testing phase for years due to a funding dispute. inter-agency wrangling and delays in getting just $69,000 to complete the project mean the system hasn’t moved beyond a prototype developed with $3 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
“To me this is a tragedy for science, even more so a tragedy for the Indonesian people as the residents of Sulawesi are discovering right now,” said Louise Comfort, a University of Pittsburgh expert in disaster management who has led the U.S. side of the project, which also involves engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Indonesian scientists and disaster experts.
“It’s a heartbreak to watch when there is a well-designed sensor network that could provide critical information,” she said.
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