“It’s like that movie, 2012: doomsday,” says 24-year-old Joshua Michael, as he struggles for a fitting reference to the fate of Petobo, his village on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi where more than a thousand are feared buried in the mud that swept over it after Friday’s earthquake.
Standing next to the remains of his house, the silver roof flattened to the ground, clothes strewn all around it, he is trying to make out where the homes of his neighbours once were.
“The houses just got sucked into the earth and then the mud came over and sealed them over,” he says. “I saw my neighbours get buried alive.”
When the 7.5-magnitude tsunami-triggering quake hit Palu it virtually annihilated Petobo.
Residents describe the road moving up and down, like a wave, and then side to side like a snake. They called it a land tsunami.
The powerful tremor ripped up the road leaving huge jagged chasms running through it. In some parts, the height of the road is meters apart. It swallowed up houses whole, as it rolled through the village.
Petobo then had to contend with a third fatal force of nature: liquefaction.
The US Geological Survey explains it as a process that liquifies the earth, which occurs when soil, saturated with water, and shaken by an earthquake, acts in liquid form.
“It’s doesn’t make sense,” says local resident, Dicky Christian, “but it’s real.”
Joshua Micheal was driving his motorbike home through the rice fields after playing a game of football when it all happened.
He says he has no words for the apocalyptic scene that unfolded before him. People were running and screaming, others were trapped, as the earthquake split open the land and houses tumbled in. He heard people yelling as they went down, then came the fast flows of liquid earth, and mudflows, that sealed them in.
Joshua looks over what was once the village, now covered with some haphazard rice plants, as one of the sites where his neighbours’ houses lie beneath.
Led the back way to the village by the Petobo resident, with the front entrance sealed off under military guard as excavators worked through piles of dirt metres high, the Guardian saw what was left of a village battered by multiple forces of nature.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
