Watching the News From Indonesia, and Feeling Small
I woke up this morning, scrolled through the news like I always do, and stopped cold. A powerful 7.7-magnitude Indonesia earthquake had just torn through eastern Indonesia’s Flores region. At least 40 people dead. Buildings down. A tsunami warning that, thank goodness, was eventually lifted — but not before thousands of people had already scrambled for higher ground in the dark, not knowing if a wave was coming for them.
I don’t have any personal connection to Flores. I’ve never been there. But something about reading it this morning just sat heavy with me, and I wanted to write it down instead of just closing the tab and moving on with my day.
What actually happened
The quake struck at 4.58am local time on Saturday, centred just off the north coast of Flores, about 15km deep. That’s shallow enough to shake hard. One professor who felt it from over 60 miles away said it best: “It felt like we were on a trampoline, it was really scary.” A second, unrelated 6.1-magnitude quake hit off northern Sumatra hours later, and there have been over 235 aftershocks since — one of them a 6.1 in its own right.
In the port town of Maumere, rescuers found 20 people dead, with more injured or still trapped under rubble. Eight of those deaths were from a landslide. A waiting room at the port terminal collapsed. In the village of Ngada, a 1.6-metre tsunami wave rolled in and buried the coast in mud and debris. Roads to Nagekeo, the region closest to the epicentre, are cut off by landslides, and rescue teams are trying to reach it by ferry because the phone lines are down too.
Hospitals evacuated patients onto the street — beds, IV drips, oxygen tanks and all — just to be safe from aftershocks. Around 2,000 people in Nagekeo alone have had to leave their homes.
Why it hits differently out here
Indonesia sits on the Ring of Fire, so earthquakes aren’t rare there — but that doesn’t make each one any less devastating for the people living through it. It’s humbling to be reminded how much of daily life, the roads we drive, the walls around us, the ground itself, we quietly assume will just stay put. For a lot of families in Flores right now, that assumption got shattered in about thirty seconds.
One resident, Yohanes Babo, was at the market when it hit. “The shaking was strong. Thankfully, we were already outside the house,” he said. “People were panicking, running here and there… My family is safe. No one was harmed.” Reading lines like that, you feel the relief and the fear in the same breath — because you know not everyone got to say the same thing.
Where this leaves me
I don’t have a neat conclusion here, and I don’t think I should pretend to. I just wanted to put this out there — partly to process it myself, and partly because it’s easy for news like this to flash by in a feed and get forgotten by lunchtime. If you’ve got a moment today, it’s worth keeping the people of Flores in mind, and if you’re in a position to support relief efforts on the ground, even better. (Details and quotes in this post are drawn from The Guardian’s reporting on the Indonesia earthquake.)
Stay safe out there, and hug the people — and the walls — you take for granted.