Officials failed to issue tsunami warning

John Aglionby

Officials in the Indonesian capital Jakarta failed to issue a tsunami warning despite receiving data about yesterday’s earthquake 20 minutes before the first wave struck the island of Java, the Guardian has learned.

The death toll rose to 327 today as rescue teams combed the devastated coastal communities. At least 160 people are missing.

One official said they were too busy monitoring the aftershocks of the 7.7-magnitude quake that triggered the tsunami to raise the alarm.

Aerial television footage showed that virtually all wooden buildings, which make up the majority of the beachfront homes and hotels, were swept away, with about half the brick structures. Many of those that remained will have to be destroyed due to the severity of the damage. Buildings up to half a mile inland were damaged.
Some 30,000 people are thought to have fled their homes but it is not known how many of their houses are still standing.

At least 181 of those who were killed died in Pangandaran, a resort about 170 miles south-east of Jakarta. A total of 89 were reported killed in Cilacap, a town 25 miles to the east, more than 40 in Tasikmalaya district and the remainder in other beachfront villages.

At least five foreigners, including three Dutch, a Swede and a Pakistani were among the dead. The British ambassador to Indonesia, Charles Humfrey, said there were no reports of any Britons being hurt.

“I think we’re going to be busy recovering corpses for many hours to come,” Major Dedi Santoso of the Indonesian military told the Guardian from Pangandaran. “There are a lot of bodies buried under the rubble. It’s as if they had no warning about what was coming.”

Survivors confirmed this. “The police and local officials did not give us any warning whatsoever about the tsunami,” Supratu, a fisherman, told the Associated Press. “Suddenly this big wall of water appeared and I started screaming and running.”

A Belgian tourist, Ian, told Reuters his warning was a waitress at a beachside running past him screaming.

“I saw this big cloud of dark sea water coming up to me,” he said. “So I grabbed the bag and started running … and then the water grabbed me and pulled me under and I was thinking this is the end, I’m going down.”

He survived by grabbing on to a cooler and rode the wave into a nearby hotel.

Many people said they were saved by memories of the television footage of the 2004 earthquake and tsunami which killed 230,000 people, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.

“As soon as I felt the earthquake I knew it would be better to start running to higher ground away from the beach,” Miskam told a local radio station. “I didn’t know if there was going to be a tsunami but I didn’t want to take any chances.”

The Pacific Ocean tsunami warning centre in Hawaii issued a warning about 20 minutes after the main earthquake and 25 minutes before the first wave surged ashore. It was acted upon by people living in Australia’s Christmas Island, 140 miles south of the epicentre.

Indonesia’s one sensor in the area, near Cilacap, detected the earthquake and sent a report “in real time” to the Meteorological and Geophysical Agency in Jakarta, an official there, Sugun, said. “It was detected about 18 minutes after the earthquake but we were so busy monitoring all the aftershocks.”

When asked if that was why they did not issue a tsunami warning to the coastal communities near Cilacap, Sugun said: “I guess it was something like that.”

Government aid started to trickle into the area today but people said they were expecting to have to wait several days for assistance. The United Nations has dispatched two assessment teams in the area.