Floods in East Java and Sulawesi, a major earthquake in Palu, two active volcanoes (Semeru, Dukono, Lewotobi), land fires appearing in Sumatera and Kalimantan, and strong winds in Aceh and Bogor, all in the same 30-day window. These were the reports that came in through PetaBencana.id in June.
Across the month, communities reported flooding in East Java, Aceh, Sulawesi Selatan, Gorontalo, Kalimantan Timur, West Java, and Riau. They also reported land fires in Sumatera Selatan and Kalimantan Utara, and strong winds in Bogor and Aceh Utara; one report noting damage from wind on June 2 that had still not been repaired by the time the report was filed on June 3.
The June 16 earthquake in Palu drew particular attention, not only because of its 6.7 magnitude scale, but because of what it recalled; the 2018 earthquake, tsunami, and liquefaction that struck the same city remains one of the most complex and devastating disasters in Indonesia’s modern history.
At 10:27 on the morning of June 16, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake struck 42 kilometers southeast of Palu, Sulawesi Tengah. Within hours, several reports had been filed to PetaBencana from the affected area. From Kota Palu: ceiling panels collapsed. From Sigi: houses destroyed in Kecamatan Palolo, several completely gone. From Parigi Moutong: road damage along the trans-Palu-Palopo highway. From Palu again: Jembatan Palu III closed to traffic. Taken together, they traced the geography of impact across four administrative areas in the hours after the earthquake; structural damage in the city, road failure in the district, bridge closures at key crossings, and residential destruction in the sub-districts furthest from formal response.
While communication systems have improved since 2018, and evacuation procedures that were poorly understood in 2018 were more familiar, not all buildings have been built or strengthened to seismic standards.
This is not a failure of knowledge. The knowledge of how to build in Palu for Palu’s geology has existed for centuries. It just wasn’t the knowledge that got used.
At one of PetaBencana’s regular community gatherings, a youth ambassador from Palu shared that the traditional houses of the Kaili people, the dominant ethnic group of Central Sulawesi, whose settlements have occupied this seismic landscape for generations, were built to withstand the tectonic shifts that are prone to this area. Their foundations do not penetrate the ground. They rest on stone. When the earth moves, the building moves with it rather than against it. The joinery uses rattan ties, not nails or poured concrete. The materials, such as timber, bamboo, are flexible. The entire structural logic is oriented toward yielding, not resisting.
Communities who had lived for generations in one of the most seismically active corridors in the world had, over that time, developed a way of building that understood the ground beneath them. The transition to concrete construction often happened without carrying forward the structural principles that made traditional buildings resilient; lightness, flexibility, the capacity to move.
PetaBencana’s youth ambassador was not presenting a research paper. She brough this up the way local knowledge usually comes up, in conversation, as context. But it was the kind of knowledge that doesn’t typically appear in post-disaster engineering assessments or reconstruction guidelines.
This is what PetaBencana’s community network is designed to make possible: the elevation of knowledge held by the people who live in these places, who understand them in ways that no risk model fully captures.
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