Tsunami museum to be built

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia -- Indonesia will build a $7.5-million tsunami museum in Aceh province to commemorate the 230,000 people who died when towering waves crashed into Asian coastlines nearly three years ago.

Architect Ridwan Kamil won a contest to design the museum, which will look like a traditional wooden house on stilts, said competition judge Kamal Arief. Names of the victims will be inscribed on the wall inside a towering chimneylike installation, said Arief, also a local architect.

The museum will be built atop a hill in the provincial capital Banda Aceh, the area hardest hit in the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami that was triggered by a magnitude 9 earthquake off the northern coast of Sumatra island in the Indian Ocean.

Many residents fled to the hill during the tsunami, and Arief said it would be used as an evacuation point if there was another tsunami.

The museum will display the culture and history of Aceh people, including information on three decades of fighting between Indonesian troops and separatist rebels that only ended after the tsunami killed 167,000 people in the province and left half a million others homeless.

The museum will also feature scientific descriptions and simulations showing the process of earthquakes and tsunami, and will show images of Aceh before and after the disaster.

Indonesia is in the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin. Earthquakes, which can trigger tsunami, are common in the area.

The Indonesia facility will not be the first tsunami museum. There is one in Khao Lak, Thailand; it opened in December with a goal of educating people about the warning signs of tsunamis and how to make evacuation plans should one hit. There is also a Pacific Tsunami Museum in Hilo, Hawaii, incorporated in 1994 with a mission statement that “through education and awareness, no one should ever again die in Hawaii due to a tsunami.”