Natural Disasters

Natural disasters are something we all learn about. We tend to find the case studies in our geography classes interesting but living in the UK we would never have to worry about them. We have all heard of the boxing day tsunami, the 2011 Japanese earthquake, the San Andreas Fault line, but that doesn’t mean that you really understand it.

On 5th August 2018, I understood what it felt like to not trust the ground beneath my feet. A 7-magnitude earthquake hit the island of Lombok and Bali as well as surrounding areas. I remember it like it was just last week. I was staying in a lovely beach side resort in Bali and we had decided to go for a walk inland to find a restaurant. We had just sat down to order when the earthquake hit. There isn’t much to describe the fear. Fight and flight had kicked it, everything slowed down and details became more refined. When locals say to run into the road, you don’t ask questions. You get up and do just that.

Running in an earthquake is funny to try to describe. If you’ve ever been on a plane and got up for whatever reason and suddenly a small amount of turbulence hits, you kind of lose you balance right? It’s like that but scaled up. The earthquake probably only lasted about a minute or so max, but it felt like 10. I remember standing there on the road, the entire island silent with fear, listening and waiting for a siren to signal that a tsunami was coming.

But alas, this time we were safe.

In this 15-minute time frame, I think a roof tile fell and there was a lot of panic. I remember asking for the Wi-Fi password from the locals and everyone laughing calling me a classic female. Actually, I was looking to find the epicentre, to find where the origin of this earthquake was. In finding that, I could find if we were at risk or not of what everyone was dreading. Tsunami. Everyone stopped laughing and very quickly told me that I was very quick on my feet thinking about that.

This is my story of someone who never thought she would experience such a disaster but many of our peers experience them yearly with monsoons, or hurricanes. But no matter how many times you experience them, the fear is all the same. The dread of losing people and belongings. I had PTSD for a few months after this experience, and I couldn’t imagine what those people who lost cherished members of family and friends, or those who couldn’t leave the island as that is home and will just wait for another one to happen.

My advice for travelling to these places. Always check if they get natural disasters. If they do, check if they are seasonal and travel around the time when they aren’t due but still be aware of the possibilities of them turning up especially with climate change causing issues. If the area is more like Bali where and earthquake could happen, but you don’t know when, this can be trickier. Make sure you know the evacuation protocol. Ask at the front desk for a map of where to go in case these things happen because you’d rather be over prepared than under prepared. Luckily in my case mum had sorted this and we all had a map on our phones ready in case we needed it. Look up and make sure you understand what to do and not to do in the natural disasters around you, because if you think standing under a doorframe is the way to go for an earthquake, i'm sorry but that usually isn’t advised.

I fully recommend travelling to these places because they were gorgeous, and the culture was phenomenal. However, I do strongly advise that you understand what could happen. I will include some photos of my trip below so you can see.