Week One in Padang

Well believe it or not, in addition to all the fun we’ve had our first week in Indonesia, we also hit the ground running with work and research as soon as we arrived in Padang.  Our first 24 hours were spent finding a place to stay (Spice Homestay) and touring the town to get a sense our new community.  Veronica makes an excellent tour guide and having her on this trip has proved to be tremendously valuable.  We quickly realized that the most important first step to working in a new country is exposing ourselves to some cultural education, and we spent some of our first days doing just that.  We’ve been learning to speak a bit of Bahasa Indonesian, Kelly has picked it up remarkably fast and has taken the role of Friendship & Communication Ambassador for everyone we meet.  Learning how and what to eat in Padang was a little difficult on our stomachs as first, but we’ve quickly become quite found of Masakan Padang and each have our favorite dishes.  They say time in Indonesia is like rubber, sometimes it stretches (and less often contracts), and we’ve been learning the cultural interpretations of “having a meeting at 2pm”.

So far Veronica, Kelly, and I have been working collaboratively on our research.  Our first matter of business was establishing activities and goals for the summer.  Veronica has been facilitating our work so far, and will be focusing on pursuing funding so that GHI can remain involved in this project in the future, as well as establishing local relationships with different organizations.  Kelly and I will be finishing the work started by the ESW class at Stanford, and developing relationships with local universities for Stanford to partner with in the future.  We’ve split up the work so Kelly is focusing on evacuation planning and bridge structures, while I’m working on the design of new evacuation structures and the evaluation of existing buildings for use as evacuation sites.

Our first meeting was Monday at the Disaster Study Center at Andalas University with civil engineering Professor Febrin and a couple of his structural engineering students.  We presented our work from the ESW class and discussed our activities for the summer, including enhancing an existing building survey started by Andalas University students.  We’ll be meeting with Professor Febrin and his students again this week.

After traveling to Jakarta Monday night, on Tuesday we visited DKP (the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries) and presented the ESW project to Dr. Subandono and Abdul (Aam) Muhari.  DKP is the Indonesian governmental organization most involved in tsunami evacuation planning, and has been doing work with partners in Japan and Germany on determining the need for evacuation structures in Padang.  If evacuation structures are built in Padang, DKP is most likely the group to make it happen, so Veronica is very interested in partnering with them for future work.

Tuesday evening we met with an architect named Adi Mudigdo from Jakarta who was interested in our research and invited us to have dinner with him and his wife at his house.  He was a gracious host and we have a wonderful time exchanging stories.  We learned about his unique experiences on housing developments in Aceh after the tsunami, and on rebuilding some amazing indigenous homes on the island of Nias.  We also had a little 12-string guitar jam session, he’s a big fan of the Beatles.  He has since provided us with some very helpful insights on designing evacuation structures.

Wednesday we took a beautiful train ride through the countryside to Bandung, where we meet with two researchers at the Center for Disaster Mitigation at the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB).  ITB has active structural engineering and disaster preparedness programs, and we presented our worked and discussed the feasibility of ITB and Stanford partnering on projects in the future.  They were very interested in the ESW course program and the possibility of forming something similar at ITB.

After our meeting at ITB, we met a research geologist named Danny at LIPI (the Indonesian equivalent of USGS) who has worked in the field characterizing the potential tsunamigenic seismic events near Padang.  After presenting our work, Danny provided us with recommendations on the most recent seismic and tsunami hazard data.  The short of it is that we expect the seismic accelerations to be a bit higher, and the tsunami flow depth to be a bit lower, than we designed for during the ESW class.  This is all pending the establishment of an official hazard map for Padang, which is critical to evacuation planning.

Thursday we traveled back to Jakarta, and met casually in the evening with Dave Hollister, a Disaster Risk Reduction Advisor with the UNDP who had helped put us in contact with ITB.  

Friday we traveled back to Padang, and we took Saturday off to celebrate July 4^th.  We spent the afternoon at a beautiful beach and the evening socializing with our Indonesian friends from Spice Homestay (Seri, Ricky, Arnold, and others) at my favorite new hangout Fella’s.  We even saw a few fireworks go off from the beach nearby.  This week, back to work in Padang…

- Scott