“Don’t worry,” she told him. “I’m here.”
It was 6:02 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 28, and what followed over the next 10 minutes was a catastrophe remarkable even by the standards of disaster-prone Indonesia. The magnitude 7.5 quake triggered not just a tsunami that leveled coastal neighborhoods but also a geological phenomenon known as liquefaction in which the soil began to move like a liquid and swallowed entire neighborhoods into the earth.
The disasters would kill nearly 2,000 people. Thousands more would go missing. Among them was Musrifah’s son, Bima Alfarezi.
THE GROUND ALWAYS TREMBLES
Growing up on the island of Sulawesi, where Palu is located, Musrifah had grown used to earthquakes. Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 260 million people, is located along one of the most seismically active regions of the world, an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin known as the Ring of Fire.
Though they could be scary, quakes in Palu rarely caused severe damage.
After a 2004 tsunami killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries, more than half of them in Indonesia, the threat of deadly waves was seared into the national imagination. But Palu had not experienced one in Musrifah’s lifetime, and most people believed the city was safe because it sits at the base of a long, relatively narrow bay shadowed on both sides by lush mountains.