The Sulawesi Tsunami and the Radical Contingency of the World ippreview.com/index.php/Blog/single/id/801.html By Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim Oct. 02, 2018 | | 0 comments The magnitude 7.5 earthquake and the resulting tsunami which struck the Indonesian island of Sulawesi on Friday September 28, 2018 have lifted the veil on the radical contingency of the world. While humankind is generally lulled by its technological mastery and regularization of the forces of nature, natural disasters such as the one which struck Sulawesi (as well as the occasional manmade disasters which result in mass deaths) reveal the efficacy of such technological apparatuses to be radically contingent on forces that are essentially beyond anybody’s control. By Sunday September 30, the official death toll of the Sulawesi disaster stood at 832, making it “the deadliest in more than a decade in Indonesia,” but the government and experts expect the final death toll to be in the thousands. Due to the destruction of road and communications infrastructure by the earthquake and tsunami, the initial rescue efforts have been located in the town of Palu , the provincial capital of Central Sulawesi, “where buildings collapsed and waves reached as high as 18 feet.” Rescue workers “hold grave fears for many of the towns” around the coastal city of Donggala , as these were closer to the epicenter of the earthquake and tsunami. The initial video footage emerging from Donggala reveals catastrophic damage : “Homes lie mangled, the tarmac of the road has been so uprooted it sits on top of rooftops and cars have been thrown upside down.” The technological apparatuses which had been installed to mitigate the risks of the catastrophe which finally did occur in Sulawesi proved to be inadequate. While the Indonesian government had invested in a high-tech network of tsunami sensors following the deadly 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that had “killed more than 230,000 people in the region,” these had been “stuck in a testing phase for years” and had been “put on hold,” and the government was instead left to “rely on limited information from existing tidal gauge stations.” Unfortunately, the closest tidal gauge , which was 200 km from Palu, “only recorded an ‘insignificant,’ six-centimeter wave and did not account for the giant waves near Palu,” prompting the Indonesian government to lift its tsunami warning just 34 minutes after the earthquake. And even if the deadly tsunami had been detected, there would have been no warning sirens as power outages caused by the earthquake meant that there was “no electricity to power the sirens.” Video footage shared on social media taken after the earthquake struck but just before the tsunami arrived showed “people in the city of Palu carrying on with their normal activities as the tsunami approached, seemingly unaware of 1/5