I arrived late last night at Jakarta airport, after an uneventful flight. What do you know? I had friends waiting for me there, ready to take me to my hotel!
Turns out I am enjoying the reflected glory of my friend Bob. Twenty years ago Bob and I met at a conference in Puerto Vallarta, me to give a paper on the water supply of Guadalajara, he to give a paper on earthquake risk in California. Attending this same conference was a friend of his also giving a paper on earthquake risk management in Indonesia. This is where I met her, Rita, and through Bob followed her meteoric rise to Chair of her Department, then Dean, and finally Chancellor of the university. Before embarking in this trip Bob had the notion that he would join me for this leg (at the end he couldn’t), so he wrote to his old friend, who in the interim had been appointed Director of the National Weather and Geophysics Service (BMKG, which also encompasses the management of earthquake and tsunami risk), and who was quite happy to send one of her own scientists, Fakhry, to pick me at the airport and be my chaperone on the two days I will be here in Jakarta. Nice!
Seven hours later, at 8 am, Fakhry came to fetch me to take me to breakfast (I had, of course, already gone out for an early look at the waking city). Breakfast was a small bowl of chicken soup, a ball of white rice, salsa, a skewer with grilled chicken livers and gizzards, and some sort of hash brown. It may sound a bit strange, but the soup had a wonderful flavor and the combination of all items was quite tasty. Plus add a cup of excellent black coffee with lots of sugar. I finally found a country that shares my sweet tooth.
Next step was getting a SIM card, which was easy except that the darn thing didn’t work. The gal at the little hole in the wall where we bought it thought it had something to do with having to register the IEMI (whatever that might be) with the Communications Bureau. Fakhry tried to do it through the internet without much luck, so we ended in the local office of Telekom, but they couldn’t figure it out, so we had to make it to the main Telekom office, where the terminal to register with the Comm Bureau malfunctioned, so this young genius set to do it “by hand”, and after a million clicks in his computer he finally succeeded. Yay for technology!
I hadn’t been to the barber in two months, so by now I was looking like the wild man from Borneo (the Malaysian part of Borneo). A hair cut and a beard trim were thus in order.
Finally we were ready to meet with Big Boss Rita, who was detained in another of her official functions, so I spent a delightful hour chatting with the chiefs of the engineering seismology and tsunami analysis sections. They are doing sterling work, in a region with complex oceanography and even more complex seismic events. In the Pacific they have lots of company from the Americans and the Japanese, but in the Indian Ocean they are it, coordinating seismic, meteorological, and tsunami warnings for Southeast Asia, Melanesia, Sri Lanka, India, East Africa, and northwestern Australia (OK, India and Australia help with satellite support, but a lot of the analysis goes on at BMKG).
Finally Rita and her husband came in, and it was truly like seeing an old friend after 20 years. She recalled many events from when we had been together in Mexico, including me taking them out for tacos. Rita sends his best to you Bob, and deeply regrets not seeing you this time round. She took the time to tell her chiefs about the work you had done to help during the Yogyakarta earthquake, and smoothly drifted into expressing the need for another volume on seismic hazard management in Indonesia (I am supposed to discuss this idea with you when I get back). I see why she was selected to be the Director, because she has an idea a minute, in this case about the possibilities for collaboration between CSU Stanislaus, BMKG, and her BMKG Institute (more about this later). On my way back to Jakarta in a couple of weeks, would I please deliver a lecture to the students of the BMKG Institute? Yes? Great, see you in two weeks … and she was off.
The scientists and engineers then took me on a tour of BMKG, where I sat on their earthquake simulator as the area experienced a magnitude 6.8 earthquake, went to the earthquake and tsunami “war room”, with banks of computers and giant monitors everywhere, where the numerous staff explained their different roles, and finally visited the meteorology “war room”, which provides meteorological information to aviation, shipping, and the public in general. It was fabulous! [Later Rita came back, and I told her how impressed I was with the technology they were handling, to which she answered in the vein of “oh, this old thing”, and proceeded to outline her plan for a major revamp in the immediate future.]
Toward the end of the visit we met a battalion of young people, maybe 200 strong, looking very smart in their “naval” uniforms. These were some of the students from the BMKG Institute, who had come to say hello to their visitor from the United States. This is when Rita came back, introduced me to the young men (two thirds of the total) and women (one third of the total), and we then proceeded to take an endless number of photographs together. True to her passion as an educator, Rita has fostered the development of a 4-year college program to train the workforce BMKG will need as it continues growing. Each class has 250 students, for a grand total of 1,000 in all four levels, with a graduating class of 250 each year, and a corresponding freshman class of 250. The course of study is heavy on the match, physics, and chemistry basics, and then the students get to learn a lot about meteorology, oceanography, and geophysics. Fakhry is a graduate of the institute (he now works in the tsunami response division), and he tells me that everyone of the graduates has a place in BMKG, albeit some are sent to remote posts in this multi-faceted island nation. This is the audience to which I have to talk in a couple of weeks about earthquake geology. Yikes!
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