The shallow quake was 200 times more powerful than the atomic bomb U.S. Still cradling her son, she thought the worst was over. Cellphone towers buckled, knocking out communication lines, while the control tower at the airport crumbled just as a final plane took flight.Īlthough much of Palu still stood, chaos was everywhere.Īt Musrifah’s home, close to the shore of Palu Bay, her family rushed onto an open-air terrace only to find it blocked on all sides by the rubble of collapsed homes. Buildings across town collapsed, including a hotel and a downtown shopping mall, where dozens of people were instantly killed and others were trapped and crying out for help. Then the big quake struck and in the space of barely a minute, several neighborhoods in the city of 380,000 were obliterated. She had family visiting and dinner was soon to be served. So when five foreshocks with magnitudes ranging from 4.8 to 6.1 shook the area over the course of several hours that Friday - the first hit at 3 p.m. “We thought that would protect us” from the violence of the sea, said Musrifah, a nurse who like many Indonesians uses a single name.Īnd few here, if any, had ever heard of liquefaction. 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.

Though they could be scary, quakes in Palu rarely caused severe damage.Īfter 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. 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. Growing up on the island of Sulawesi, where Palu is located, Musrifah had grown used to earthquakes.

Among them was Musrifah’s son, Bima Alfarezi. The disasters would kill nearly 2,000 people. 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. 28, and what followed over the next 10 minutes was a catastrophe remarkable even by the standards of disaster-prone Indonesia.

The quake 2018