While I was living on Gili Trawangan in Indonesia we had a few fires there. Three to be exact. It has been a while. I don’t remember everything that happened then, but I will tell it as I remember it.
I had just gone during lunch to the market to swap my old book for a new one. I had read almost every book of the two main bookstores and it took me a while to find one. The owner of the store got bored waiting for me I guess and went outside. After 5 minutes he came back all excited. He called to me pointed at the sky and told me to come outside. There was a huge black smoke column rising into the air and seemed to come from somewhere in town. I paid for my book. I overpaid him I think, but I wasn’t interested in bargaining, I wanted to see what was going on and if my house and stuff was safe.
When I got back to the shop, there was nobody there. People were running towards the fire. The first people were carrying buckets and plastic containers down to our pool. Ari, our general manager, soon brought out large blue water containers, normally used to collect rainwater, to be carried up to the village. I went up to have a look at my house and couldn’t see any immediate danger to it, so I went down and helped carry water for the next 2 hours up to where the fire was. After a while people got more organized. The containers got bigger and by now we had little carts as well to help us carry the water. It didn’t look like we were making any progress though. A friend of us, another dive instructor, lost all her stuff to the fire as the bungalow and the houses around burned down to the ground. People, locals and tourists were tearing down wooden fences and whole houses to prevent the fire from spreading. People were carrying their belongings out of their houses and rooms and stacked them on the roads away from the fire. Slowly we were able to confine the fire to where it had started. But it still took another couple hours until the fire was out.
By then the roads were literally under water. You could still hear buildings collapsing, because the damage was just too extensive. And it was unbelievably hot everywhere. Everybody was drenched and unbelievably dirty and sweaty. During the first couple hours there was an atmosphere of despair in the air, but after a while, most people started to react with black humour and the atmosphere lightened up a bit. Altogether over 40 houses burned down. Apparently the fire had started in the employee quarters of the resort Vila Ombak and then spread from there north to the village. We were all very lucky that day as there was hardly any wind.
Still, the island was definatly not prepared for something like this to happen. Many families were homeless and all the businesses started to collect money and clothes for the victims of the fire. It has to be said that the locals and the tourists worked together extremely well to help fight the fire and later it was mostly the tourists that came up with most of the donations.
After the fire was out, at around 4 pm, our dive shop crew went back to our shop. Our pool was half empty and after we had all jumped in it seemed more like a swamp than a clear swimming pool. We all started drinking beer and shandy then. The diving operations that day were cancelled. Luckily nobody was seriously injured and we all started to finally relax.
There had been a little fire before that and a couple weeks later there was another fire in the middle of the night, where 10 houses burnt down.
Later, when I was the dive manager, the main businesses on the island tried to buy fire fighting equipment with parts of the donations, but because of local politics nothing had happened before I decided to leave the island maybe 6 months after the fires. I don’t know what the situation is now, so if you got some news then let me know…
Tags: Disaster, Donation, Fire, Gili Trawangan, Homeless, Indonesia
Mick Gordon - 21 September 2006 @ 5:42 AM
I am glad I followed through for the rest of the article, very interesting.