Ron Harris thought that when he published
academic papers forecasting the next natural disasters in Indonesia, the
information needed to keep people safe would trickle down to the them.
But it didn’t. The 2004 Indian Ocean
earthquake and tsunami hit, killing about 230,000 people in 14 countries.
“It was just a shock,” said Harris, a
professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at Brigham Young University.
“I personally felt like I had blood on my hands. I knew what was going to
happen.”
He realized only a few people would read his
academic papers, which were in English and written in technical language. Even
information in newspapers wouldn't make it out of the big cities, and reports
to the government never seemed to make it to the people.
“That was a wakeup call for me,” Harris said.
“I thought I was doing all I could to protect the people and I realized that
all of my efforts were being wasted because I was focused on the academic
aspect of what I was doing. I wasn’t going to the places where people were in
harm’s way and telling them.”
So he set up a nonprofit, In Harm’s Way, to
try to raise funds to teach people how to protect themselves. In July, two BYU
professors, 12 BYU students, three Utah Valley University faculty members and a
couple of UVU students set out for a five-week trip to the island of Java in
Indonesia, partly funded by a grant from Geoscientists Without Borders, and
with some paying their way there.
Pairing with an Indonesian university, the
group was able to teach about 3,000 people how to know if a tsunami is coming
and how to evacuate.
“I can’t even begin to express how many
miracles happened and how we felt like this work we were doing was so much
larger than ourselves,” Harris said. “This was something that needed to happen
and people embraced us and what we are doing.”
One of their messages, 20-20-20, teaches
people that if the ground shakes for 20 seconds, then they have 20 minutes to
evacuate to 20 meters elevation. It was a simple message, but effective because
most of the people didn’t understand that it’s more of the duration of an
earthquake, not the intensity, that can cause a tsunami.
“That is something the education team did
that will save lives,” said Daniel Horns, associate dean of the College of
Science and Health at UVU. “I’ll say that outright. It will save lives for
those people if there is a significant earthquake in the near future.”
In 2006, a tsunami hit the island that killed
about 600 people.
“Most people would have been saved with this
kind of education,” Horns said.
He said the researchers will return to
Indonesia next summer to continue the project.
The group studied geologic evidence to see
how high the waves could go, tested the population’s baseline knowledge of
tsunamis and did posttests after educational sessions. During evacuation
drills, they were able to test to see if evacuation points were high enough,
and learned that the children were more than willing to show them where to go.
“A lot of the students already knew where to
evacuate for a tsunami,” said Sarah Hall, an assistant professor of public and
community health at UVU. “They’d start running and we’d be running after them.”
There are tsunami warning systems on the
island, but Hall said they aren’t hooked up because of cost, so the residents
could be waiting for sirens to go off that never will. The group also learned
that most people also thought they had an hour to evacuate instead of 20
minutes.
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