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…