Simeulue, Indonesia’s Miracle Island
Amidst the news of death and devastation caused by last Sunday’s earthquake, there are a few miracles too. Once such story is that of the Simeulue island (known in the surfing community for its world class waves), which despite being just 25 miles from the epicentre, was miraculously almost untouched.
CNN reports
.. the movement of undersea plates off the northern tip of Sumatra moved the Nicobar Islands and Simeulue Island out to sea by an unknown distance ..
The island was literally lifted and placed somewhere else! Such awesome was the power of the earthquake (estmiated to be equivalent to 32 billion tons of TNT). To put it in perspective, “Little Boy“, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima (on August 6th, 1945), had an explosive force equivalent to 13000 tons of TNT.
In addition to the entire island being lifted, island folklore played its part in saving lives. The mayor of the island was quoted saying,
“Our ancestors have a saying - if there is an earthquake run for your life”.. “Thousands of our people were killed by a tsunami in 1907 and we have many earthquakes here.”
The Sydney Morning Herald reported,
Only five of 70,000 villagers on Simeulue were killed, all of them in the earthquake that struck at 7.55am last Sunday. Nobody perished in the five-metre-high walls of water that followed.
The harbour master was quoted saying that they had a primitive form of tsunami warning in place, thanks to folklore (that probably generated in the 1800s when the last great tsunami hit the region) which goes like whenever there is a strong eartquake, run to the hills.