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Mentawai tsunami death toll triples

JAKARTA LIFE'S STYLE

After a tsunami hit the Mentawai Islands on Monday, one villager struggled through 30 kilometers of forest to reach Sikakap, abandoning dozens of bodies that lay strewn in his flattened hamlet.

Brenti’s home in Muntei Baru-Waru in Batumonga village on North Pagai Island — one of Mentawai’s three main islands, was devastated by an earthquake-triggered tsunami on Monday night.

More than 300 people were killed by the tsunami and about 100 more missing, according to authorities. They said earlier that 113 had died.

Brenti said the first wave was eight meters high and engulfed half of the hamlet. But the second wave struck like a giant wall and was higher than a coconut tree. It struck harder and deeper, eventually reaching the slopes of a hill more than 800 meters inland.

“Only 40 people survived. All 73 houses were gone. The night after the disaster, we — the injured and babies — slept under the rain on a hill in the back of our hamlet,” the 40-year-old said, as quoted by Josh Kamatis, a disaster post coordinator for North and South Pagai Islands in Sikakap, who shared Brenti’s story with The Jakarta Post.

“Those who survived were those who ran to higher ground after the first wave struck, while the dead were mostly those who could not escape the second wave.”

Brenti’s wife and two children were swept away in the tsunami.

When Brenti left his ruined hamlet, dozens of bodies lay scattered on the ground and over 100 people were still missing.

He said that most residents had not felt the 7.2-magnitude quake as they were inside their homes due to rain. Residents were shocked after hearing a thundering sound that resembled loud wave breaks about 15 minutes after the earthquake.

Soon afterwards, the tsunami swept the hamlet.

“The hamlet is just a name now. No more buildings. On Wednesday, 80 dead victims were found and 102 still missing. There were only 40 survivors,” said Kamatis, adding the dead had been buried the same day.

Two days after the disaster struck, the death toll continues to rise, with the disaster post listing 282 dead and 411 missing.

The tsunami badly damaged 25,426 houses, flattened six hamlets and forced 4,500 residents to evacuate to makeshift shelters.

Rescue workers and relief supplies intended for more than a dozen villages on the islands arrived by plane and helicopter on Wednesday.

West Sumatra Disaster Mitigation Agency Operational Control Center head Ade Edward defended the agency’s decision to lift a tsunami warning that had been issued immediately after the temblor struck.

He said his office had not established a tsunami early warning system for Mentawai Islands, adding that even the most advanced equipment could not have processed warning signs fast enough to avoid disaster in the regency after the earthquake.

“The [epicenter] was very close and the tsunami arrived in just 15 minutes, so it was unnecessary,” Ade told the Post on Wednesday.

“The most sophisticated system currently available needs five minutes to process information from an earthquake before issuing a tsunami warning — and a issuing a command to respond to the field would take more than 15 minutes. It would have been too late for Mentawai.”

An early warning system would have been effective for the provincial capital, Padang, and for other areas along West Sumatra’s western coast that were more than 200 kilometers from the epicenter, he said.

When the earthquake hit on Oct. 25, Ade said his office had processed information from weather stations but did not issue an evacuation order since the sea level had not decreased. “In 15 minutes, we decided that a tsunami would not hit the west coast of Sumatra and informed the public by radio that there was no need to evacuate,” he said.

Mentawai Islands regency lawmaker Jan Winnen Sipayung said that some victims might have been asleep when the earthquake struck.

“Nearly all of the villages that were devastated by the tsunami were unconnected to the power network, so most residents went to sleep early. Some of the people likely failed to flee to safety after the quake,” he said Wednesday.

thejakartapost
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