Indonesians Try to Rebuild Amid Tsunami’s Ruins

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia — The high school math teacher faces an unusual dilemma: What do you do with an 85-foot fishing boat that saved your life but now sits on top of your living room?

The midwife has an even bigger problem: How do you get rid of a massive floating power station that crushed your uncle’s house and came to rest outside your window?

The people of Aceh face problems small and large, ordinary and bizarre, as they rebuild the region most heavily damaged by the massive Indian Ocean tsunami, caused by an earthquake that struck Dec. 26. The disaster killed at least 150,000 people in Indonesia alone.

More than 10 months later, 500,000 remain displaced from their homes in Aceh, the Indonesian province on the northern tip of Sumatra island. Half of those now live with relatives or friends; about 150,000 stay in tent camps or flimsy wooden barracks. Some survivors, frustrated by the slow pace of recovery, have erected tents on the concrete slabs where their homes once stood.

There are many similarities to the devastation caused by the hurricanes that hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, said Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, head of the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency for Aceh and the nearby island of Nias. But the Stanford-educated industrial engineer noted that the tsunami resulted in many more deaths than the hurricanes but caused much less property damage.

More than 400 nongovernmental aid organizations, most from other countries, are helping survivors here.

In some parts of Banda Aceh, the provincial capital, the land has sunk at least a foot and the tents are regularly flooded during the highest tides. Farther south along the coast, the land has subsided as much as 5 feet in some places, making rebuilding impossible.

“There is water all around now, but there wasn’t any before the tsunami,” said Linda Wati, 42, as she removed soggy belongings from her flooded tent in Banda Aceh and hung them out to dry.

“Don’t ask us why we are living here,” she snapped. “Just build us a house.”

Other survivors have set up tents inside structures that are so badly damaged they look like they might collapse in a strong aftershock. In one little community of tents inside the shell of a ruined commercial building, the inhabitants said they feared another earthquake but had nowhere else to go.

“The tsunami took everything we had,” said Ilyas Abdi, 32, a fisherman who lost 10 relatives and all his possessions. “We are just surviving here.”

Kuntoro acknowledges that the recovery has been sluggish, especially from the perspective of people living in temporary housing.

“For them, we’re slow,” he said. “We accept that criticism. If I tell them that we already built 6,000 houses, it doesn’t mean anything as long as there is still somebody living in a tent.”

Along the devastated coast, there are long stretches of wasteland, much of it flooded, with scattered tents amid the ruins.

In some areas, workers from neighboring provinces are busy building hundreds of houses where thousands once stood. Kuntoro said he hoped that 30,000 homes would be built in the province by the end of the year.

Much of the debris has been hauled to the marshlands, where scavengers pick through it and pull out scrap metal.

At the crowded tent camps, inhabitants have become so accustomed to living on handouts that visitors are peppered with requests for cash, food and a new volleyball net.

Kuntoro, an energetic former Cabinet minister who has been heading the recovery effort for four months, says he has made considerable progress in building an organization and securing funds to carry out a program that will take years. International aid groups have entrusted his agency with more than $4 billion despite Indonesia’s long record of corruption.

“Out of $7 billion pledged, we already got $4.4 billion,” he said. “For a 4-month-old agency like this, it means we are really trusted by the whole world. Now we have to maintain their trust. We have to show that all the money will be spent wisely. We have to prove that there’s no corruption in this program.”

The biggest challenge facing the reconstruction effort in Aceh is simply reaching many of the towns and villages along the coast that were closest to the epicenter of the quake. Harbors, roads and bridges were destroyed and transporting building materials to the region is difficult.

One of the largest aid programs is a $245-million project by the U.S. government to rebuild the 150-mile road, with 110 bridges, that ran along the west coast of Aceh.

Not everything changed by the tsunami has been for the worse. The need to rebuild prompted rebels and the government to negotiate the end to a 29-year war that had claimed 15,000 lives. The rebels have begun handing over their weapons and the government has begun withdrawing troops from the province.

In addition, the government quietly halted construction of a major section of the Ladia Galaska road that was planned to run through the heart of Gunung Leuser National Park, the only major wilderness area left on Sumatra and home to some of the last Sumatran tigers, orangutans and elephants. Environmentalists had long opposed the road, which they said would promote illegal logging and feed corruption.

To help fight illegal timber harvesting in the province, Kuntoro said, his agency will use cement and bricks whenever possible and much of the wood used in rebuilding will be brought to Sumatra from legal sources.

Kuntoro’s agency is not yet in a position to help someone like Habasiah, the high school teacher with the boat sitting on her house.

During the tsunami, her house was one of the few on her street that withstood the waves. She said she and her four children took refuge in an upstairs room, along with dozens of others, neighbors and strangers.

Outside, the swirling water was full of debris. It rose to their chins and she was certain she was going to die. She said she thought of the biblical story of Noah and prayed for an ark.

“All of us in the room thought it was the end,” she said.

Just then, a neighbor shouted through a hole in the roof that there was a fishing boat outside. They climbed through the roof and out the windows and clambered aboard. The boat saved 57 people, Habasiah said.

“God heard what I wanted and sent us a boat,” she said. “I think it’s too fantastic.”

Only when the water receded did she realize that it was lodged on top of her one-story living room. Named the Satu Putra, or One Son, the boat had floated about a third of a mile from the Aceh River, where it had been undergoing repairs.

Boat owner Hasri Julian says he doesn’t have the money or machinery to move the vessel. Every day, sightseers come to marvel at the boat. Balanced on the remaining walls of the living room, it is stable for now. Without reinforcement, it inevitably will come crashing down.

For now, Habasiah is content to visit her house and quietly celebrate being alive. “We come over almost every day,” she says.

Even more remarkable is the sight of the floating power station, once a familiar coastal landmark, sitting in what is left of a residential neighborhood of Banda Aceh. The barge, 210 feet long and 63 feet wide, broke loose from its moorings and floated more than three miles inland.

Zahra, the midwife, said she was on a neighbor’s roof when she saw the barge come within a few yards of her. She was certain she had been washed out to sea.

When the seawater receded, the barge came to rest on houses and cars. Crushed cars are visible beneath it. Loaded with fuel that day, the vessel weighed 1,400 tons.

Zahra says six members of her uncle’s family are missing; she thinks they were on the roof of their house when the power station came in. Sixty bodies were recovered from under the barge, but those of Zahra’s relatives were not among them.

The barge, however, did not bring only death. As it floated inland, it became a life raft for more than 600 people.

Now, the four-story, 10-megawatt power plant dwarfs the modest houses that survived the tsunami. The seawater-cooled plant used to generate nearly a third of Banda Aceh’s electricity. Now it is too far from the sea to work. Officials of the State Electricity Co., which owns the barge, say they have no idea what to do with it.

Times staff writer Dinda Jouhana in Jakarta contributed to this report.