Lessons Learned

A look at what lessons are being learned-and-applied-in the wake of the May earthquake in Indonesia
by Erwin Maulana and Thor Kerr

On 27 May, just before six o'clock in the morning, about 37 kilometres south of Yogyakarta, a 5.9 magnitude earthquake shook Indonesia's Yogyakarta and Central Java provinces, one of the world's most densely populated regions.

According to a preliminary report from the World Bank, the May 2006 Java earthquake was one of the world's costliest natural disasters in the past ten years, causing nearly 6,000 deaths, tens of thousands of injuries and an estimated US$3.1 billion in total damages. Damaged and destroyed houses account for over half of the total damaged value-the latest estimates from the Indonesian government show that about 330,000 houses were destroyed or badly damaged; another 278,000 suffered light damage.

While the severity of the damage has been blamed principally on the earthquake's relatively shallow depth (11.8 kilometres below the earth's surface), a general failure to properly construct buildings against earthquake forces was a critical factor.

Indonesia is no stranger to earthquake disasters: this earthquake follows the horrific 2004 tsunami; and on 17 July 2006, just six weeks after the May earthquake, another tsunami hit the coast of Java, leading to hundreds of dead and more damage.

Since structural failure was a major contributor to housing damage and human loss, FuturArc has talked to local architects and survivors to find out what building conditions existed before the earthquake and what lessons are being learned and applied to prevent another such tragedy.

A Look to Tradition for Strength

While the earthquake's shallow depth was a major factor in its impact, the overall scale of the damage was made worse by a failure to meet safe building standards and to employ basic earthquake-resistant construction methods. The majority of homes in the area were built with low-quality materials and lacked structural frames and reinforcing pillars. Many of the deaths and injuries occurred when buildings and walls fell on the victims. While the most affected were the poor, damage was not limited to housing. Many public buildings, particularly schools, collapsed, which was also blamed on a failure to enforce building codes

Unfortunately, the government has been slow to offer assistance in reconstructing private houses, leading many homeowners to repair or rebuild their homes either by themselves or with help from the community. Reconstruction in some areas is aided by relief agencies, like the Red Cross Red Crescent.

Bimo Suryanto, who lives in the heavily hit Bantul district in Yogyakarta province, has organised local homeowners to rebuild homes. He says the reconstruction efforts must not only meet basic building standards, but also take into account that the village sits on the fault line. If these homes were built to the same standard as their previous homes, they would again be vulnerable to a future disaster. When local residents saw that modern public buildings also collapsed, they concluded that new homes must not only be earthquake-resistant, but must also be built to minimise personal injury even if they are destroyed, Mr. Suryanto says.

When evaluating reconstruction needs, people looked to the local government for guidance in planning and building. At the time of writing (on 6 August), no government reconstruction aid had been delivered to villagers in the affected regions of Bantul or Klaten. In the absence of government guidance, Mr. Suryanto says many homeowners in his village have started the rebuilding efforts on their own.

Since villagers are rebuilding with extremely limited resources, they are looking for materials and methods that meet fairly simple and straight-forward criteria: they need to be affordable and offer safety, security and basic day-to-day comfort. Given that so much damage and death were caused by collapsing brick walls, homeowners are looking to more traditional building materials, such as wood and bamboo.