Jose Borerro - Research Assistant Professor, University of Southern California - School of Engineering Where and when the next mega disaster will strike —volcanic eruption, earthquake, tsunami or hurricane—is the focus of National Geographic Channel’s Explorer episode Violent Earth. Below, tsunami scientist Jose Borrero, of the University of Southern California, describes his visit to Banda Aceh with an NG film team, barely one week after the December 26, 2004, tsunami—a tsunami so strong it actually moved the island of Sumatra a hundred feet. Day 1 - January 3, 2005 - Medan, Sumatra After landing in Medan on the northeast coast of Sumatra, I’m hitching a ride with a National Geographic film team to explore the area demolished by the tsunami that struck on December 26, 2004. There are eight support guys waiting to meet us at the airport with three vans full of camping, cooking, and survival gear. Our objective is to drive the coast road from Medan to Banda Aceh, the region hit hardest by the tsunami. I believe I will be the first scientist to get into the area. I’m going to Banda Aceh with surveying tools and GPS mapping equipment to quantify the tsunami’s power at maximum impact. I’m hoping an analysis of the wave’s destruction will suggest ways to protect people from the next one.

A river in Sumatra, Indonesia.

Several hours of driving from the streets of Medan eventually get us to the town of Idi. There is a bridge over a large river with many brightly colored boats. A few have sunk. We stop and I ask the boatmen if the tsunami surge came up the river. They said it did, and that it had sunk a few boats and killed some people farther upstream. The surge height here was estimated at only about three feet, but they say it was much worse out on the open coast. We took the long bumpy beach road a few kilometers out to the coast. It was definitely a lot worse. The waves came inland about 500 meters, with a height of some two meters. They destroyed several of the poorly built front-row houses. Day 2 We are awakened at 5:30 a.m. to news that the armed separatist rebels have attacked a convoy in the mountains north of us. Everyone was anxious to reach Banda Aceh before nightfall. There is supposed to be a ceasefire as a result of the tsunami, but the local guys just laughed when we asked them about this. Coming into Banda Aceh was surreal. It was sunny but hazy; a stiff wind was blowing dust everywhere. The first signs of catastrophe were some collapsed buildings, but given that it was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, things looked OK. As we got closer to the town center, the disaster became more and more obvious—buildings down, cracks in walls. Then we got to the Grand Mosque. There were piles of debris left carried by the tsunami and a thin layer of mud everywhere. The tower at the front of the mosque was cracked and leaning. The tsunami had deposited debris here, and we were miles from the open ocean. The words war zone barely did the scene justice. But it wasn’t even close to what I would see over the next few days. On the riverfront the scene was mind-blowing. Boats were twisted and smashed and piled up on top of the bridge where we were standing. There were piles of debris 20 or 30 feet high. There were bodies in the piles, legs and arms sticking out. Based only on the smell, there had to be three hidden corpses for every one I saw. I walked around and tried to focus on taking data—flow depths, locations, building damage—but I was completely overwhelmed by the scale of the destruction. Every time I turned a corner I would see something completely shocking. I’d see a pile of debris and it would take me a few minutes to realize that there was a boat on top of it and a body at the bottom. The support crew cooked dinner for us and we slept comfortably in tents in the Governor’s compound, unlike the thousands of displaced people scattered in refugee camps around the area. Sometime during that first night a big aftershock hit. I was under the influence of a sleeping pill and barely noticed. I heard people yelling ‘earthquake!” I woke up for a minute or two and saw one of the National Geographic guys with his head outside the tent. I thought this was funny, because we were in the safest place—outdoors in a tent. I just rolled over and went back to sleep. The next day we noticed that there was a large, heavy TV antenna mounted on a 10 ft pole stuck loosely in the planter box that was above our tent. If that had come down, it would have hurt. Day 3 Together with Gunawan, our local Indonesian security expert, we walked from the river area to the north towards the open ocean. It was unreal—an entire city had been reduced to rubble. Only one house in 20 was still standing, and even then only partially. I went to each semi-intact house and took a GPS location and measured flow depth by looking for the mud marks on the walls—three meters, four meters, five meters, the numbers kept rising as we got closer to the ocean. Every once in a while a dead body would surprise me. Depending on the wind direction, we might smell it first. Later that afternoon I was able to head west to see the tsunami effects on the side of Sumatra facing the Indian Ocean--the region directly facing the epicenter of the earthquake. The waves should have been much bigger out there. The very first bridge we reached, about 300 yards from the sea, was completely blown apart. The remnants of the concrete and steel decking were pushed upstream about 20 yards. Beyond the bridge it was hard to tell what had been there before—possibly a town. There were foundations and wall sections scattered on the ground. Huge Australian pine trees had been up-rooted and tossed around. The ones that were still standing had the bark uniformly stripped off to a level well above five-meters. I measured the stripped off bark on one tree that was knocked over and it was over 10 meters above the roots. This indicates that the water was flowing at least 10 meters (33 ft) deep at the shoreline. Another 40 or 50 trees had been uniformly snapped off at about five meters high. This puzzled me at first, but then I noticed the huge coal barge with the tugboat still attached that was a few hundred meters down the beach. The barge must have swept across the trees and snapped them all off at that height. I climbed up the hill to where the trees had been snapped off and all of the topsoil and dirt had been flushed away revealing bare rock. *** For another four days, Borrero continued to survey different regions of the coastline—taking measurements and photos at each site. He presented his results to the Indonesian Ministry of Political, Law and Security Affairs. To read Jose’s full journal click here