Japan helps Indonesia restore tsunami-damaged Aceh land files

Japan helps Indonesia restore tsunami-damaged Aceh land files

The Indonesian government, with assistance from Tokyo, began
on Wednesday the final process in the painstaking restoration of
thousands of land title documents damaged when the tsunami hit
Aceh province in December.

Thousands of documents stored at the land registry office in
the provincial capital Banda Aceh were damaged when the tsunami
and ensuing flooding hit the province on Dec. 26.

Their restoration "has become possible only with the unique
technology and know-how developed in Japan for historical
document conservation," the Japanese embassy said in a press
release.

Japan provided the technical expertise as well as the
necessary equipment worth US$146 million for the task.

The start of the final process of restoration was marked by a
ceremony here where the heads of the National Archives and the
Land Registry Office and Japanese ambassador Yutaka Iimura
pressed the button to activate a freeze dry vacuum chamber used
in the process.

In January, a Japanese expert started working with Indonesian
partners to save 6,565 land document files, corresponding to
42,966 land titles, damaged at the Banda Aceh land registry
office.

The documents were first sterilized and then stabilized in a
freezer to protect them from further damage.

On Wednesday, the documents began to be dried in the freeze
dry vacuum chamber, before being digitally recorded to build up
map databases of land titles.

Aceh province and Nias island were the hardest hit by the
tsunami that killed more than 270,000 people on the rim of the
Indian Ocean. -- AFP