FIRST IMPRESSIONS - GUNUNG SITOLI

"An old man wanders dazed through the rubble. He has part of a shop scale and seems to be searching for the rest of it. His eyes never stop wandering over the wreckage but there is no sign of focus on any particular point. He is barely aware of me and can only nod in answer to my questions"

From out at sea Gunung Sitoli looks like a green town in a lush tropical setting. Then as the distance closes, the jumble of fallen buildings and skewed roof tops starts to dominate. Up close it is worse than a war zone. The destruction on the flat city center is total. What still stands is cracked and precarious. After a while a pattern emerges and I start to talk to the locals about what happened the night of March 28th.



Muhammad Oman has his hardware shop door opened a crack and I ask him about buying a hand fuel pump. The one we have carried all the way from Banda Aceh for WFP has been stolen by the local boat crew who carried WFPs fuel and stores to shore... along with 3 drums of fuel! and I want to help them out buy getting one to replace it. They hired the boats but in the face of so much destruction there is no one to blame. Muhammad has no stock. "The shop next door was much bigger than mine but they are all dead". I ask if he lost family and why his shop still stands with most of its contents intact.



"I'm from Padang and my shop is small and only one floor. The other shops were owned by Chinese and were 3 or 4 stories high. They all sleep on the top floor or on the roof in hot weather. When the quake started they all ran downstairs to get outside. We were all afraid there would be a tsunami and we were all told to run to high ground if a big quake hit us"

"The Chinese always have three sets of security doors and when the power failed they could not unlock them fast enough. Almost all the bodies were found on the ground floor" (there are unconfirmed reports that 80% of the dead in GS were ethnic Chinese Indonesians)

"I ran for my front door but everything fell off the shelves and I could only get it open a crack before it jammed. I could see the houses going down all along the street one after the other. Like they had bombs under them... boom, boom, boom"

"Some shops like mine survived because their walls run East-West like mine. The waves shook us from East to West and I was thrown up in the air and kept falling down. Then the fires started all around. The flames lit up the town and my friends helped me to open my door and get out".

A few hundred meters away the ground rises and a low hill is the site of a Catholic school built by German missionaries 80 years ago. The old timber buildings are in perfect condition and packed full of families who have fled the flat land. Next door a modern concrete structure is standing without a crack. They are built on bed rock.

Gunung Sitoli in common with most Indonesian cities has been built on sedimentary reclaimed swamp land close to a river mouth. Rivers kill the coral that otherwise fringes the coast and so they are the only place boats can land.

One has to wonder what percentage of Indonesians live in houses built on low lying swampy land. In Padang the number must exceed 80% of the entire city’s population.