• BLOG SURF
KATHMANDU, FEBRUARY 22
On September 28, 2018, Indonesia's Central Sulawesi province was struck by a series of cascading natural hazards. An afternoon of foreshocks culminated in a magnitude 7.5 earthquake that caused some of the most severe soil liquefaction observed globally.
Residential neighborhoods were swallowed whole. The seismic event triggered multiple tsunami waves, reaching Palu City within six minutes of the earthquake. In some places, the water reached nearly six meters in height, destroying low-lying homes and coastal infrastructure.
The disaster resulted in more than 4,400 deaths, 170,000 displaced people, over US$500 million in damages, and US$1.3 billion in losses - an estimated 13.7 percent of Central Sulawesi's regional GDP.
Since then, the government of Indonesia and the World Bank have partnered to rehabilitate, reconstruct, and "build back better" through the Central Sulawesi Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Project and the Contingent Emergency Response Component under the National Slum Upgrading Project (CERC-NSUP).
A version of this article appears in the print on February 23, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
