Indonesia needs natural disaster mitigation plans

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.