Journal of Natural Disaster Science, Volume 29, Number 1, 2007, pp13-19

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Toward an Integrated Tsunami Disaster Mitigation: Lessons Learned from
Previous Tsunami Events in Indonesia
Abdul MUHARI1, Subandono DIPOSAPTONO1 and Fumihiko IMAMURA2
1
Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, Republic of Indonesia
2
Disaster Control Research Center, Tohoku University, Japan(Received for 27 Feb., 2007 and in revised from 31 May, 2007)

ABSTRACTIn the last two years, the tsunami phenomenon has become a very serious issue in Indonesia. The 2004 Sumatra
tsunami caused 130,000 casualties with another 37,000 missing, presumed dead, and financial loss sufferedreached $ 4.3 billion. A tsunami struck the Pangandaran area again, West Java Province, on July 17, 2006, whichcaused 668 casualties with another 45 missing and financial loss reaching $ 44.7 million. The damage to theseinfrastructures and lives clearly shows that disaster mitigation and disaster countermeasure efforts are still not running well. This is becoming the background to the urgent need for integrated tsunami disaster mitigation to build awell-prepared coastal disaster community in the near future.

1. INTRODUCTION
Tsunamis have become the biggest killer specter for communities in coastal tsunami-prone areas in the last decade. In
Indonesian regions overall, there are no seasides in Indonesia safe
from tsunamis except the west coast of Borneo and the east coastof Sumatra. The large scale of this natural disaster hazard potency
is accompanied by vulnerability of social condition, infrastructures,
economics, policies, and the local state of bureaucracies as theeffect of complexity and its fast growth. This results in most
coastal districts in tsunami-prone areas often neglecting natural disaster mitigation aspects in their development.
The tsunami that was generated by a mega earthquake on thewestern coast, northern Sumatra, December 26, 2004 was a breakthrough that awakened the government and all Indonesians to thesusceptibility of Indonesian coastal areas to tsunamis. Although
historical tsunami records in Indonesia indicate that tsunamis happen almost every two and a half years on average (Table 1), there
is no significant intention towards tsunami mitigation because there
are only few people with knowledge of the past.
After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the government ofIndonesia focused on activities of tsunami risk reduction to develop
an tsunami early warning system, which is known as theIndonesian Tsunami Early Warning System (INA-TEWS). It has
been making quite a lot of progress in its infrastructure development, but the 2006 West Java tsunami showed that its dissemination technology still needs to be improved, so the information canreach localities in tsunami-prone areas before a tsunami comes.
This paper will review the effect of the 2004 Indian Ocean
tsunami and its reconstruction progress. Furthermore, it will evaluate the physical characteristics of the 2006 West Java tsunami andlocal community responses by analyzing the results of a questionKEY WORDS: tsunami, disaster, mitigation, questionnaire

naire survey that was conducted by the Ministry of Marine Affairs(MMAF) Republic of Indonesia. The results of this analysis will
become an additional point to enhance coastal community
resilience with implementation of an improved plan, which will be
discussed in this paper.
2. GREAT 2004 INDIAN OCEAN TSUNAMI AND
RECONSTRUCTION PROGRESSOn December 26, 2004 on 00:59 GMT or 07:59 AM local
time, an earthquake of 9 Mw created a sudden vertical rise of theseabed and triggered the displacement of massive volumes ofwater, resulting a giant tsunami devastating some 800 kilometers ofAceh s coast line where 16 districts and 654 village lie in its
region. The tsunami killed some 130,000 people and left a further
37,000 missing, presumed dead, as well as 514,000 refugees.
Furthermore, this tsunami was also responsible for 4.3 billion US$
loss of the social sector, infrastructures, transportation, communications, fisheries, energy, and the environment. A further earthquake on March 28, 2005 affected the islands of Simuelue andNias and southern Aceh, creating significant further loss of 900
dead and 13,500 families displaced.
In response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the emergency
responses conducted by Indonesian government were followed byreconstruction and rehabilitation works. President Instruction(INPRES) No. 1, 2005, which covers thirteen ministries, theNational Coordinating Board for Disaster Management, theIndonesian Army, Police, National Board for Land Affairs, andalso the Governor of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam and North
Sumatra gives the direction to perform emergency response activities and preparation of the reconstruction and rehabilitation phase
after the 2004 earthquake and tsunami. Starting with clearing duty

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A. MUHARI, S. DIPOSAPTONO AND F. IMAMURA

Table 1. Historical tsunami record in Indonesia (1965-2006)

Fig. 1DART buoy position along Indonesian waters

for almost 5,765,000 cubic meters of tsunami waste and debris, thework is continuing with housing reconstruction programmed forhouseholds who have completely lost their houses and their land,houses that are irreparable and need to be rebuilt, tenants who havelost their accommodation, and squatters who have lost their temporary shelters in totally around 80,000-110,000 houses in Aceh andanother 13,500 in the Nias Area. These works were conducted
together with establishing coastal land and spatial planning basedon the disaster characteristics of the region.
In providing social services, institutional development needs
to be re-established to build the institutional capacity for administration and government duties in Aceh and Nias because the tsunami took the lives of well over 5,000 local government staff in its
region. From more than 2000 school buildings that were damaged
in December 2004, 632 permanent schools in Aceh and anotherFig. 2

Epicenter of West Java fs tsunam

124 in the Nias region have been built up to 2006, supplemented by
379 temporary schools. This is accompanied by the provision of
5,100 teachers in Aceh and 285 in Nias in order to replace approximately 2,500 teachers who died in the event. The overall progressof the reconstruction is presented in Table 2.
In order to manage future tsunami disaster risk, it is a very
important step to create an end-to-end tsunami warning system inIndonesia. Although there are still many contradictory opinions

TOWARD AN INTEGRATED TSUNAMI DISASTER MITIGATION: LESSONS LEARNED FROM PREVIOUS TSUNAMI EVENTS IN INDONESIA

Table 2.

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Reconstruction progress in Aceh and Nias

about the effectiveness and high cost of its equipment. The national tsunami warning system in Indonesia is known as INA-TEWS(Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System). In collaboration
with another country, Indonesia will deploy twenty-two buoy systems of Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis(DART) (Fig. 1). The yellow inset box contains three DART
buoys that have already been deployed: the red one is made byIndonesia and was deployed near the Sunda Strait on April, 2007.
The other two are made by Germany and were deployed in
Bengkulu Province and Siberut Island, West Sumatra Province offshore on November 2005.
The DART system will be combined with seismograph andtide gauge networks along Indonesian waters starting in 2006. The
Indonesian government through the Meteorology and Geophysics
Agency (BMG) will install 160 seismic censors every 100 km
along earthquake disaster-prone areas in Indonesia.
3. WEST JAVA TSUNAMI
One and half years after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, it
again struck Indonesia on the south coast of West Java Province on
July 17, 2006, triggered by an earthquake of 7.7 Mw, located at

9.295 S and 107.347 E (Fig. 2).
The earthquake followed by a tsunami that had a maximum
run-up height of 8.5 meters (MMAF Tsunami Survey Team, 2006),
swept most of the coastal villages along the south coast of WestJava Province and Middle Java Province (Figs. 3 and 4), causing
more than 668 casualties and financial loss of $ 44.7 million up to
July 2006. This financial loss is still increasing because of the collapse of the tourism sector that has been become the primary sector
in local economic development.
In order to analyze the characteristics of the tsunami and local
response at the time tsunami happened, Ministry of Marine Affairs
and Fisheries, Republic of Indonesia, conducted a questionnaire
survey in tsunami-affected areas in October up to November 2006.
This survey was held in five villages: Cikembulan Village,
Pangandaran Village, Wonoharjo Village, Sukaresik Village inCiamis District, and Cilacap Village in Cilacap District (Fig. 5).
This region represents the area most damaged by the West Javatsunami on July 17, 2006.Thirty to hundred questionnaires weredisseminated in each village. In Cikembulan Village, seventy
questionnaires were circulated. From this number of questionnaires, fifty-nine were collected and analyzed. In PangandaranVillage, fifty questionnaires were disseminated but only twenty-

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A. MUHARI, S. DIPOSAPTONO AND F. IMAMURA

Fig. 3Fig. 4

Impact of West Java fs tsunami on houses(Photo from MMAF tsunami survey team, 2006)

Impact of West Java s tsunami on rice fields and sand dunes

four were collected. In Wonoharjo Village, a hundred questionnaires were disseminated and eighty-six were collected. In
Sukaresik Village, fifty questionnaires were circulated but only
twenty-seven were collected. In Cilacap Village, thirty questionnaires were circulated and eighteen were collected and analyzed.
The analyzed parameters from the questionnaire were: i)establishing of tsunami warning by the government and tsunami
education held either by governmental or non-governmental institutions before a tsunami takes place; ii) tsunami characteristics thatare analyzed by the question of the existing water receded before
the tsunami came and whether the earthquake was felt by thecoastal community and its intensity according the MMI scale ofintensity; iii) community response at the time of the tsunami happened quantified by quick response by the locality on that time of
the tsunami and the evacuation site chosen by the locality.
For tsunami warning issued by the goverment, 11% of the
respondents in Cilacap Village felt that they received a warning,
while the remaining 89% said that there was no warning from thegovernment. Here, 72% of overall respondents mentioned thatthey received some information about tsunamis from brochures andleaflets disseminated by the government and the mass media, andthe other 28% felt that they had never received any information
concerning previous as well as future tsunami hazards in their area.
In Cikembulan Village, 22% respondents said that they receive awarning before a tsunami comes, while the other 78% felt that
there was utterly no warning from the government. Thirty-one percent of the total respondents in this area say that they receive infor-(Photo from MMAF tsunami survey team, 2006)

mation about tsunamis, while the other 69% felt that they neverreceived any kind of information about tsunamis (Fig. 6).
However, most of the respondents include an uncontrollable situation and people screaming as warning.
Respondents in Sukaresik Village say that a mere 7% of themfelt that they receive warning and have received information concerning previous and future tsunami hazards. The rest of respondents in this area felt that they never receive information abouttsunamis and have not been warned about the possibility of tsunami occurrence after an earthquake by anyone. In PangandaranVillage, 50% of the respondents felt that they have received warning about the possibility of a tsunami after an earthquake, alsocounting 62% of the total respondents who felt that they havereceived information about tsunamis.
From the questionnaire results in Wonoharjo Village, 6% of
the respondents said that they were given warning, while the rest
felt that there was no warning from the government (94%). Nine
percent of the respondents felt that they had been given information about tsunamis, and the others (91%) felt they had never been
informed about tsunamis. From direct interviews in the study areawith respondents who felt that warning was disseminated, it was
not warning about the possibility of tsunami occurrence establishedby a government institution, but the warning was the sounds ofpeople screaming while running in a panic situation. These respondents also mentioned that warning in the locality comprises natural
pre-tsunami characteristics such as dark sky, thundering sounds,
continuous tremor that follows the tsunami wave, and the salt smell

TOWARD AN INTEGRATED TSUNAMI DISASTER MITIGATION: LESSONS LEARNED FROM PREVIOUS TSUNAMI EVENTS IN INDONESIA

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

Questionnaire survey results for evacuation by locality

Fig. 8

Questionnaire survey results for earthquake intensity

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Tsunami questionnaire survey area

Questionnaire survey results for establishing warning by thegovernment

before the tsunami comes.
Local community response at the time of the tsunami was analyzed from the prompt responses of coastal society against tsunami
threat, and the meaning of evacuation that was conducted by the
locality was also analyzed. Generally, when coastal people realize
the existence of a tsunami, they instinctively run to avoid the tsunami wave. In Cikembulan Village, 75% of the respondents evacuated, while the rest had no time to evacuate because they werealready trapped by the tsunami or they lived on high ground.
In Sukaresik Village, all respondents evacuated, as was thecase with Pangandaran Village. In Wonoharjo Village, 84% of the
respondents evacuated, while the rest (16%) did not evacuate fortwo reasons: first, some people were already swept away by thetsunami and the others stay wherever they were at the time thetsunami happened because of shock. Sixty-one percent of the
respondents in Cilacap Village did not evacuate. Those people are
persons living on high ground (Fig. 7).
Some alternative places that were chosen by the coastal people
for evacuation represent instinctive emergency response by local
people. Hills and coconut trees are the most chosen by localities,
but some people chose rice fields or going back to their houses as
the best place to escape from the tsunami. These are the indicatorsof the locality s understanding of emergency response at the timeof tsunami.
To investigate the earthquake characteristics of the 2006 WestJava tsunami, the questionnaire results for earthquake intensity thatwas felt by local people indicated that almost all respondents in thesurvey felt no significant shock and some people felt a strong
earthquake (>5 MMI) located in Pangandaran Village (37%) andCilacap Village (45%). Many respondents felt continuous tremor
following tsunami propagation onto the shoreline. Before it reaches the shoreline, a tsunami gives a sign by abnormal receding of thewater. Except in Cilacap Village (22%), most of the respondents
observed unusual receding of the water before the tsunami came(Fig. 8).
4. INTEGRATED CONCEPT FOR TSUNAMIDISASTER MITIGATION
In general, the policy of tsunami disaster mitigation inIndonesia is directed towards minimizing the risk caused by tsunami to lives, the economy, livelihoods, societies, natural resources,
and the environment. The concept is based on three connectedcomponents (Fig. 9). An early approach to obtaining appropriate
conditions for development and implementation of the concept isestablishing a national law to shade and direct the state and district
policy of land use and general development based on mitigation.
This year, Indonesia already has a national law for disaster management and a national action plan for disaster risk reduction.
Risk identification and assessment is conducted comprehensively and involves stake holders, which are national and local government, scientists and experts, NGOs and also prominent local
figures. In addition to a scientific approach, risk identification andassessment also performed by a social approach to obtain local
knowledge and experiences of each society against tsunamis.
The approach consists of establishing coastal land use plan-

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Fig. 9A. MUHARI, S. DIPOSAPTONO AND F. IMAMURA

Three integrated components of tsunami disaster management(International Tsunami Information Center, 2005)

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Fig. 12Fishermen

ning based on vulnerability assessments and risk analysis, developing education through formal and informal institutions/schools to
educate vulnerable coastal communities, establishing a detailed
plan for emergency evacuation routes that are provided by hazard
maps and disaster prevention maps, organizing tsunami drills orother types of exercise in order to make the appropriate responsethat is more than an instinctive reaction, and raising the awarenessof coastal communities about tsunamis (Fig. 10).
Dissemination of tsunami brochures, posters, calendars,announcements, or exclusive reports and interviews on radio andtelevision can be categorized as non-structural mitigation
approaches. In this classification, further development of a national and local tsunami warning system is also taken into consideration.
For coastal community resettlement, appropriate incentive

Hazard map and tsunami drill activity in Bali

(Photo from MMAF, 2006)

Mangrove and coastal forest rehabilitation in Indonesia(Photo from MMAF, 2005)

s safer house in Pangandaran Village constructed by MMAF (Photo from MMAF, 2006)

TOWARD AN INTEGRATED TSUNAMI DISASTER MITIGATION: LESSONS LEARNED FROM PREVIOUS TSUNAMI EVENTS IN INDONESIA

packages as livelihood opportunities to encourage coastal communities to abandon settling in vulnerable locations should be provided. In the case of fishing villages, workshops and warehouses cannot be swept away from low land near the beach. However, residential houses, schools, and other public facilities should be located at high ground. For the convenience of fishermen s daily work,roads from residences to the beach should be built.
Maintenance of the environmental and ecological stability of
the coastal areas through the rehabilitation of mangroves and beachforests, and also of lost and degraded coral reefs and sea grassbeds, to help stabilize the coastline and prevent beach erosion, thereconstruction of swept away coastal sand dunes, the protection ofremaining sand dunes, and the creation of buffer zones (green
belts) along the coastlines are classified into as natural approaches
to structural measures (Fig. 11).
Structural methods with artificial protection are not usually
appropriate for developing countries because of their cost. In
Indonesia, this method is implemented only for fishery house retrofitting so far. The concept of this house is based on Indonesian traditional architecture by strengthening the platform of the house andraising it up from the ground, with the section below the (second)
floor remaining empty, so the dynamic force of tsunami current
flow only affects the pole of the house. The direction of the houseshould be perpendicular to the shoreline (Fig. 12).
As further steps of this work, collaboration between international tsunami research communities to share experiences, scientific knowledge, and expertise should be encouraged to increase thecapacities of relevant authorities and vulnerable communities. An
integrated tsunami disaster concept should be implemented by government departments and non-governmental organizations and by

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involving local communities in planning and implementing themeasures. By continuing assistance to coastal communities on its
implementation, a community-based tsunami disaster risk management system will be created as the final goal of the concept proposed in this paper.
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