'All of a Sudden the Water Rose Up, Higher and Higher'

Indonesian Villagers Recount Struggle to Survive Tsunami

Photos
Tsunami Hits Southern Coast of Java
Six-foot tsunami waves triggered by an underwater earthquake swamped several resorts and village seafronts on the southern coast of the Indonesian island of Java Monday.

PANGANDARAN, Indonesia, July 18 -- Eli Mulyani was cradling her year-old son in her arms when the wall of water crashed through the front of her family's auto repair shop, lifting a car off its blocks and heaving it toward them.

The tsunami, which affected more than 100 miles of coastline on Java island Monday, killing at least 531 people, jarred the baby from his mother's arms and they both went under, she recounted. When Mulyani surfaced, gasping for breath, there was no sign of the boy, Krisna. She dived repeatedly into the murky, neck-high water, frantically looking until she felt his soft head beneath her feet. She fished him out and held him tight.

"I thought I lost him," whispered Mulyani, 37, a slight woman with small, weary eyes. "But I found him alive, pale, almost all white, but alive."

Then, almost instantly, a second surge of water ripped through the remains of the repair shop and Mulyani again lost her grip.

This was Indonesia's second pummeling by the ocean in 19 months. The geographic scope was small compared with the tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004, which killed more than 220,000 people in 11 countries around the Indian Ocean. In Aceh province on Indonesia's Sumatra island, 131,000 were killed, and 41,000 remain missing. But in its limited area, Monday's tsunami struck with comparable force, its swell in places rising higher than palm trees.

In Pangandaran, a beach town popular mostly with Indonesian vacationers, the sudden surge devastated dozens of small hotels arrayed along the sea, battering open brick facades to soak beds and cabinets and stripping wood-and-thatch food kiosks clean off their concrete foundations. The tsunami picked up chairs, bicycles, beer kegs, chunks of brick and satellite dishes, and deposited them in the mud as far as a quarter-mile inland.

On Tuesday, aid workers were arriving, and the government was trying to explain why there had been no organized warning, just a few people shouting "Tsunami!" as they saw the water rolling in.

Science and Technology Minister Kusmayanto Kadiman acknowledged that about 45 minutes before the waves struck, two foreign monitoring agencies alerted the government to an undersea earthquake and the potential for deadly waves. But the warning was not passed on to threatened communities, he said, citing concern that it might be a false alarm, the Associated Press reported.

In any case, Java has no comprehensive system to get word to the village level. Sumatra, deemed to face the greatest threat of a repeat tsunami, has an alert system in place; Java was due to get one in 2007. Kadiman said the government would speed up work to create a system to cover the entire Indonesian archipelago of more than 17,000 islands.

Like the tsunami of 2004, Monday's disaster was replete with tragedies -- but also tragedies averted.

As Mulyani watched the waters begin to recede, her son floated to the surface.

"I was sure he was gone. Gone. But thank God, now he's here," she said, holding the dark-eyed boy in a faded sling around her chest. A broad, red bruise showed beneath his light, infant hair and his left eye and nose were bloody. But Krisna appeared alert, and when he cried, it was only for mother's milk.