Many Indonesians would have survived a deadly earthquake last month if houses had been built out of bamboo and other flexible materials, says an architect on a mission to transform devastated villages.
Eko Prawoto, who is working with homeless survivors in Ngipikan, a village in an area hard-hit by the quake that rocked Central Java and Yogyakarta, blames poor construction techniques for the huge loss of life and injuries.
"Many people who died in this earthquake died because of the brick walls that fell on them," he said.
PHOTO: AFP
The 6.3-magnitude temblor killed 5,800 people, injured up to 40,000 people and destroyed or damaged almost 600,000 houses in the heavily-populated area, which like much of Indonesia faces a constant risk of serious earthquakes.
Many of the houses that were damaged or flattened were built of brick and concrete and featured little reinforcement to resist the shockwaves of the quake, Prawoto says.
A preliminary assessment by the government's Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) also blamed poor construction for the high injury and death toll.
A bookshop and some houses in Yogyakarta built after Prawoto's mostly timber designs survived the May 27 quake undamaged, were his first experiments in quake-resistant construction.
"It's a wooden structure -- which is elastic -- and absorbs shocks ... During an earthquake, you have pushing and pulling forces. Each junction should resist these kind of forces," he said.
In Java, as in much of Indonesia, residences made of bamboo and timber are generally looked down upon as poor people's housing, whereas concrete and brick are viewed as symbols of modernity and rising wealth, Prawoto said.
Nevertheless in the aftermath of the quake, many traumatized villagers now fear living or even sitting inside brick or concrete buildings.
"It's a traumatic experience for them," he said.
For Ngipikan, where almost all the houses were destroyed, Prawoto has designed houses for rebuilding that use traditional materials but have a modern twist: The lower half of the house walls are brick and the upper half bamboo, with coconut trees used for the structural posts.
"It's important to apply bamboo and timber in a different way so as to give the image of newness," he said.
"We use brick but only 1m high -- so in case an earthquake happens again, if it falls down then it's not so dangerous," he said.
Assisted by donations from the local daily Kompas, Prawoto has begun building four of a planned 65 houses. He hopes the houses will serve as a model for other residents looking to build cheap but strong new homes.
With free labor provided by villagers and using recycled timber from the collapsed houses in combination with low-cost bamboo, he estimates each house will cost 10 million rupiah (US$1,060).
The government has promised to pay 30 million rupiah to quake victims whose houses were destroyed, but Prawoto suspects such assistance will take months to be disbursed and people cannot wait that long.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
RSS