With climate change supercharging cyclones, experts call for Indonesia to enhance preparedness

Despite obvious signs that a powerful cyclone was brewing, life carried on as usual in the Indonesian province of East Nusa Tenggara last month.

Aside from grounding ships and airplanes from travelling in the rough weather, hardly any preparation was made.

Locals said that they were never warned while government officials did not seem to pay much attention to tropical depression TD 99S, which had been getting more and more intense since Apr 2 as it travelled through the Savu Sea.

Even the province’s then-disaster mitigation chief, Thomas Bangke, appeared indifferent about the warnings. Mr Bangke, who was in Bali at the time on a business junket, did not shorten his trip and order for disaster preparations back home. He was eventually removed from his position days later for neglecting his duties.

TD 99S later developed into Tropical Cyclone Seroja in the early hours of Apr 4, just as people in the predominantly Christian province were preparing to celebrate Easter.

That morning, the cyclone made landfall in the Island of Timor, which Indonesia shares with Timor-Leste. The cyclone’s centre came dangerously close to the provincial capital Kupang, a city of 400,000 people.

With windspeed of up to 150km/h, the category one cyclone dismantled roofs, uprooted trees, sent debris flying and caused a ferry sitting on the harbour to capsize and sink.

From above, the cyclone was blanketing almost the entire province. In the remote islands of Adonara, Lembata and Alor, about 200km north of Kupang, Cyclone Seroja was causing extreme rainfall of up to 360mm per day.

It rained heavily for nine hours and the islands’ barren and sparsely vegetated landscape struggled to contain the influx of water. A series of landslides and flash floods occurred almost simultaneously in numerous areas of Adonara, Lembata and Alor islands, washing away people’s homes and knocking down bridges and roads.