Indonesia needs natural disaster mitigation plans
A seminar on disaster mitigation was jointly held by the Indonesian Urban Disaster Mitigation Program and the Bandung- based Pikiran Rakyat daily in Bandung from Sept. 10 through Sept. 12. The meeting was attended by 30 journalists from all Java provinces. The Jakarta Post was represented by Fabiola Desy Unidjaja. Below is her reports.
BANDUNG (JP): Although Indonesia is one of the world's most natural disaster-prone countries, it has nevertheless failed to have a legitimate agency to concentrate on disaster mitigation efforts, experts said.
The country does have the National Disaster Coordinating Board (Bakornas PB), but it is only operative when disasters happen. Indonesia does not have any concrete plans regarding disaster mitigation, said project manager of the Indonesian Urban Disasters Mitigation Project Krishna S. Pribadi.
The board, which is coordinated by five ministries, also lacks authoritative power to issue regulations to people living in hazardous zones so that they may be saved from danger when disasters happen.
"If a disaster strikes the country, none of the local government departments are ready to handle the worst situation that arises from the catastrophe," Krishna said, hinting that Indonesia could face a similar tragedy like the deadly earthquake in Turkey last month if the Jakarta government did not begin to implement a disaster mitigation program.
The world was shocked when the death toll in Turkey reached more than 14,000, while a million other people were made homeless. The tragedy has even led United Nations Secretary- General Kofi Annan to appeal to the international community to adopt a prevention strategy for disaster relief measures.
Indonesia's unpreparedness to cope with natural disasters was evidenced in a 1994 earthquake, which killed about 200 people in Liwa, a regency in southern Sumatra. When forest fires broke out two years ago in some parts of Sumatra and Kalimantan, Indonesia had to appeal for help from other countries to extinguish the fires, which had created devastating haze in Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei.
If only the Indonesian government had adopted the disaster mitigation plans, the hazardous effects could have been minimized.
A former assistant to the minister of welfare, Soeriaatmadja, acknowledged that a government decree issued in 1990 regarding a disaster management program had never been properly implemented.
"In fact, the decree covered all phases of disaster relief, but none of them have been implemented," Soeriaatmadja said at the Bandung seminar.
Experts agreed however, that despite the country's limited budget for monitoring disasters, the government should encourage public awareness of coping with natural disasters. They suggested training children to instinctively look for shelter and flee from dangerous zones when a quake takes place.
The experts acknowledged that buying sophisticated equipment for early quake detection would be too costly for the country, which has been blitzed with economic woes.
"There are many ways to manage disaster mitigation so as to minimize the loss of lives and materials," Krishna said.
Creating and publishing maps of hazardous zones in Indonesia is also an effective way to prevent people from inhabiting areas close to active volcanic mountains or river banks that are often inundated during the rainy season.
The Indonesian Urban Disasters Mitigation Project has started to develop an awareness of disaster mitigation by preparing the disasters mitigation action plan for Bandung.
The action plan, designed to prepare for possible quakes predicted to happen once every 200 years in Bandung, provides continuous information regarding the inspection and readiness of public facilities should a disaster occur.
The Bandung local administration has agreed to implement the plan because, according to scientific calculation, there is a 60 percent chance of an earthquake affecting the city.
"This is a start, hopefully another city in the country will follow suit," Krishna said.