Saving People In Harm's Way

I'm Marcus Smith, and this is Constant Wonder. Join us as we quest for the awe and wonder of knowing we are part of something infinitely larger than ourselves. The Mokan, the Orang Laut, the Bajau. You may never have heard of these various groups of sea nomads who dwell in boats and stilt houses along certain islands and coasts of Thailand, Myanmar, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Sea nomads have inhabited Southeast Asia for untold generations. And for all the picturesque, inviting images of their lifestyle that you can find available online, theirs is actually a rigorous and often precarious existence. On December 26th, Boxing Day 2004, a megathrust earthquake magnitude 9.2, its epicenter deep in the ocean off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, triggered a tsunami that took the lives of 230,000 people in the region. We're going to focus for just a moment on how the Mokun sea nomads fared during this cataclysmic event. Traditional knowledge acquired over many centuries allowed them to survive at rates far higher than other humans in the tsunami's path people of greater wealth and more education The Mokun were equipped with understanding not shared by most of their neighbors They tell each other that there's this wave that eats people called Labun and you'll know that Labun is coming because the earth starts to shake and you have to immediately go to high ground and they have some shelters up about 40 or 50 meters above sea level in the hills that they go to every time there's an earthquake that's what happens and everybody has to know that even the kids because there's not time for mom to go gather her kids or dad to go gather the kids or the kids like looking for their mom that's the hardest part is to make sure that the kids know that Laboon is real. And when they feel that earth shake, it's a tsunami alarm. For this episode of Constant Wonder, which relates to the angrily quaking, rumbling, roaring, exploding earth, we have a gentle and deeply contemplative guest. He's a geologist from here on the BYU campus. Dr. Ron Harris has great respect and admiration for the age-old wisdom passed down among people like the Mokun. In addition to his ongoing work as a researcher and university professor, he was motivated by that 2004 Sumatra tsunami disaster to organize a non-profit. It's called In Harm's Way. Ron estimates that the organization since its founding has saved 50,000 lives In harm's way was more than just a brainchild Conceived to help avert theoretical disasters on this scale The massive Boxing Day earthquake, for instance Ron knew it was real, he saw it coming He had actually published papers forecasting its likelihood but his dire prognostication never made it to populations who were living in harm's way. And then, after nearly a quarter of a million fatalities, he was inconsolable. It was the following year, in 2005, that he founded this organization dedicated to getting the word out, relying heavily on the very people who live in vulnerable regions, the potential victims, to educate and prepare their family and friends. The closest I've ever been to an epic seismic event is roughly 700 miles. That's the distance from where I was living, and still am living here in Provo, Utah, to Mount St. Helens. If you were not alive or alert on May 18, 1980, you will not remember the shock and terror of witnessing even just live broadcasts from the vicinity, of this volcano's eruption. Each of the 57 human fatalities at Mount St. Helens, that was someone's life, even though the death count admittedly pales in comparison to the tsunami of 2004. As it happens, Ron Harris grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and was always mesmerized by the close-by Cascade Mountain Range, with its lakes and forests and many volcanoes, including Mount St. Helens. Very early in his education, he became obsessed with the science of plate tectonics, the movement of plates in the Earth's crust that are connected with earthquakes and the formation of volcanoes. Major, beautiful volcanoes. Some of them that had formed before the Ice Age and the Ice Age just carved them into these really steep spires. Others that have erupted after the Ice Age that are beautiful, pyramid-shaped mountains that you just can't take your eye off of. I remember the first time I saw Crater Lake or the first time that I climbed South Sister or fishing at the base of Mount Thielsen, which is this steeple-like mountain. I'm fishing and I'm looking at the mountain the whole time. Every time I see them, it's like I'd seen them for the first time. It would still be years before I would meet Ron, but we were actually both living here in Provo when the side of Mount St. Helens, one of these pyramids, exploded in spectacular fashion. I was a college freshman. He was a young married sophomore also at BYU here in the Rocky Mountains of Utah. But when this volcano spewed rock and ash onto the very landscape of his childhood and teenage adventures, he felt compelled to transfer from BYU. That very fall of 1980, he returned to his hometown specifically to enroll in the geology program at the University of Oregon. He ached to be just a few hours' drive from the now vastly altered landscape he had been so familiar with. I had to be there to actually see how much change happened in such a small period of time. Mount St. Helens was a place where we would go before it erupted. And when it erupted, it blew the whole side of the mountain off and covered the lake, Spirit Lake, where we used to fish. In order to visit his old haunts, which were now essentially unrecognizable, he had to flout the authorities. I just got a car and went up there and went around the signs that were trying to keep people out, but I had to go there, drive through the ash, grab samples of the ash, and just look at the place myself. I never thought in my lifetime that one of those volcanoes would have come alive. So given the fact that volcanism, this is the dynamic thing that can blow and be just incredibly beyond dramatic, devastating. And given the fact that your work focuses in part on these kinds of processes, does it spook you? Not really. It doesn't. I have a wanderlust, which is huge. And as a geologist, you want to go to the site. That's the only way you can really collect good data. And yeah, there's been some close calls. But if I die from an ash well, it's a very honorable way to die as a geologist. Now, I didn't know whether to laugh or scold Professor Harris at this point. But you can definitely hear in his voice a sense of extraordinary commitment to his field. I asked him if he felt called to geology. And he mentioned something that might have seemed an insignificant coincidence when it happened. He was about 25 years old at the time. One of our friends wanted my wife and I to stay at their house while they were on vacation. And he had this book on Alaska. I could feel the gravity pulling me into that book. And I just had a premonition, you're going to go there someday. Alaska is far from a bad destination for somebody committed to the study of geology. And Ron did make it to Alaska as a master's student. While at the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, during a class called Mountain Building Processes, he had to pick a region of the world to focus on. I chose Indonesia because it was so active. Like in the Rockies, people were like, well, you know, this is how it happened 100 million years ago. And I wanted to be to a place where it was actually happening now. They have more explosive volcanoes, more earthquakes, more tsunamis than any other place on the planet. Indonesia remained the research focus of his during his Ph.D. studies in London. And it was during this season of his life that intensive research on the ground in Indonesia got underway for him. He was exactly where he wanted to be, in what is one of the most dangerous places in the world, seismically speaking, that is. Over the last 450 years, there's been over 125 tsunamis in Indonesia. So that's one every four years during that time. And in the last 10 years, we've had three. A lot of the places we go are way out in the middle of nowhere to find data. Traveling all over in a developing country, lots of uncertainty, lots of language problems, language barriers, There's cultural differences, staying in people's homes out in the middle of nowhere. The transportation back and forth on these scary roads with people driving out of control. Ron could write volumes just about these incidentals, the adventures and inconveniences and downright hazards he has had over the past four decades working in Indonesia. And as difficult as these may have been, they come with the territory. Ron says they've come with a calling. His commitment runs deep. He knows that geologists, seismologists, volcanologists have lost their lives in eruptions and ash flows. You and I both heard him talk about an honorable death. As his career progressed, his work became far more than just a scholar's quest for knowledge. In my visiting with him, I found that Ron's motivation is more than intellectual appetite alone, more than the raw curiosity that compelled him to investigate the aftermath of the Mount St. Helens eruption. I'm talking about a commitment to saving lives. Learning and serving are, of course, not exactly oil and water, but he did actually have to wrestle with this subtle distinction in the early years of his professional career. His eight-year-old son drove home a painful lesson for him. This happened right after he returned from one of those research trips to Indonesia in the late 1990s. I just put my bags down and my son and his friend were in the room. And my son's friend went over and looked at my bag and it said, Dr. Ron Harris on it. So he asked my son, I didn't know your dad was a doctor. My son said, well, he's not the kind of doctor that helps people. And I sat there, at first I got a little bit defensive because of all the hardships I had to go through to do this research. But the more I reflected on it, the more I thought, out of the mouth of babes. I mean, I had to admit that that's what I was doing. Ron Harris knew he needed to adjust his course. He applied for a Fulbright Fellowship because of that program's focus on real-world challenges abroad. After all, he wanted to be a doctor who helps. One of the reasons why I wanted to do the Fulbright is because it represented a pivot in my interest, not just in how things formed, but also how they are hazards and helping people understand the hazards so they can have a much higher response efficacy when they're confronted with one. They know what to do. In the academic world, it's very easy to see your scholarly tasks as research and analysis to size up problems, think them through toward better understanding. But what if the whole point of scholarship is to go much further than just that, beyond the neutral performance of such tasks? Well when Ron received his Fulbright grant he set out along with his young family for half a year stay on the island of Java As he met people from various parts of Indonesia who lived in danger zones he didn always connect the dots from his academic tasks to his ultimate motivation Remember, this was some time before the 2004 tsunami happened. During those six months of study, he would visit with people, be they from cities or rural villages. Now, many people in Indonesia, particularly on Java, have traditions about the danger of the Queen of the Southern Sea. But apart from the Mokun near Thailand, Ron is unaware of any indigenous peoples who have passed on ancestral stories that tie the danger of the sea to any prescribed course of action. The more he rubbed shoulders with people in the region, the more poignantly he began to sense that he was falling short of his ideal. His expertise was not yet making him a real doctor with genuine help for people. With my son, we would walk through village to village to village, and we would say hi to the locals and maybe play soccer with them a little bit. But we went through the village without really talking at all about the hazards that we were trying to measure. While on Java for half a year, Ron Harris tells me, he felt like a doctor who wasn't really helping anyone. But he held to the idea that his research would eventually yield applicable results in the interest of actually serving humanity. Just after the Fulbright experience, Ron published an analysis from his findings. These findings appeared in an Indonesian journal and included an observation that the region, already well known to have frequent earthquakes, was actually overdue for a seismic event of unusual magnitude. The problem is nobody communicated the forecast. It was published, you know, in a scientific journal, which nobody has access to. And even if they tried to get it digitally, it's like 50 bucks. And even if they could get it, it was written in scientific language. And so there's this big gap between what our research was showing and where we really needed to do the work was communicating it to the people in a way that they took it seriously. In 2002, Ron again issued his forewarning about seismic movement, potentially cataclysmic, near Sumatra. This was published in a BYU alumni magazine called Bridges. There he described how his data analysis indicated that pressure had long been mounting along the tectonic subduction zone, along the upper reaches of what is called the Sunda Trench. This lies in a giant arc from the coastline of Sumatra and extends all the way up to Myanmar. But this article was published in English for a small, if educated, audience, and the chances of anyone in the danger zone reading it were practically nil. A megathrust earthquake is not merely a local or regional event. It's the planet rearranging itself. Analogies are scarcely possible, but it's been said that the energy released in a 9.2 magnitude quake is equivalent to the detonating of tens of thousands of atomic bombs in rapid succession along the length of a subduction zone. They said there's some big seismic gaps here. One of them is the west coast of Sumatra, which has enough energy to create a magnitude 8 plus event. The event when it actually happened was a 9.2, which means we were a long ways off, more than one order of magnitude off in terms of the amplitude. 300 times off on the energy released. The third largest earthquake ever recorded on the planet happened two years after we put this in print. So everybody thought we predicted it. You had not predicted it? No, the P word is way too precise for what we did. We forecast it. The difference there is there's a lot more uncertainty with a forecast than there is a prediction. The only thing we were going on was the fact that there was very little seismicity in this huge area that was 1,600 kilometers long. Essentially like the whole state of California without an earthquake, but a plate boundary that's active. In just a moment, we'll go to that day in 2004 when Ron Harris realizes to his horror how right he had been. and how in that very realization, his sense of a calling increased by an immeasurable order of magnitude. I'm Marcus Smith, reflecting with Ron Harris on his professional and personal life, defined in a profound way by one of the great natural disasters of modern human history. You're listening to Constant Wonder. Embark on a whimsical journey with The Appleseed and host Sam Payne. It's one of many shows from the BYU Radio family of podcasts. Wrap yourself in captivating stories, expertly woven by talented storytellers. You'll hear live studio audiences taking immense delight in a broad tapestry of tales, some humorous, others poignantly reflective. The Appleseed is always a family-friendly experience. It sparks imagination, creative enough to make fiction feel like fact and bring real-life events back to life. The Appleseed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. We now return to Constant Wonder. December 26, 2004. Sometimes it's referred to as the Boxing Day tsunami or earthquake. And where were you? How did you learn about it? That was a day. yeah is it fair to say that is one of the biggest days in your not just professional life but in your life it is i got a call early in the morning from my mother-in-law and she's like ron it happened i'm like what happened she's like the earthquake you've been talking about and i just stood there stunned i'm like she must be talking about the sumatra area because we talked about that she goes you gotta go look at the news and so i turned the tv on and i was just horrified um i still am horrified and i felt like i had no clue how bad it could really be when we wrote that paper and that i was part of something that was so much larger than myself that needed so much more help to to try to protect people from it was just yeah it was it was put me in a state of depression for months to think i had a connection to that event but not the kind of connection i wanted i wanted to have the connection where i'd gone from village to village to village to village to village telling people about it telling them what to do when they felt the ground shake that they needed to run as fast as they could like the mocom people do right the mocom people because of their generational stories they survived it wasn't long before the news agency showed up here on the byu campus and brought out the bright lights and put you on camera tell me about that experience it was really hard because i i hadn't really had a chance to process it very well yet and the more I saw, the more horrified I became about it. I actually saw people on TV that I knew that they were interviewing and telling about how their families were wiped out and so on. But yeah, the newscasters, their big story was going to be, why didn't the people listen to you? And I just broke down. I said, it wasn't that they didn't listen to me. It was because I didn't tell them. nobody told them nobody sent the message to the people who lived in the seismic gap that they were at risk and more importantly what to do about it well did you not feel like you had published on this i realized for the first time how frustrating it is to try to get the word to the actual people in harm's way because you can publish in the best journal in your field and it's in English and it's in scientific language and it's in a journal that most people can't actually access and so there needs to be a person in the middle who can keep track of the literature understand it and then communicate it effectively to those who are in harm's way and that still doesn't exist in most places. How long did it take you to start coming to an awareness that your approach before this disaster had to be somehow overhauled with a new focus that would lead to the help that people need the lights went on for me when i read an article about this tsunami the journalist said well they they predicted the event okay we'll give them an a minus on that but they get an f in the communication department and get an f in implementation of disaster or risk reduction strategies. And I just, it hit me. Look, it's not just going there and assessing the hazard and publishing papers about it that only academics will read. We have to have the communication and implementation part. In fact, the Mocum people taught us those are the two most important parts. They knew nothing about tsunami science, nothing about fall zones. they couched it in a mythological way that there was this monster that nobody had seen but would eat people and they had the highest survival because they focused on the communication and the implementation of risk reduction you'll remember how we began this episode with the mention of this group of sea nomads called the Moken people they knew just from ancient stories that if ever the earth were to shake for very long Everybody needed to head immediately for higher ground. Well, I asked Ron Harris to get a little more specific about their survival rate compared with the rate for inhabitants of the region who were not conversant with these stories and teachings from days of old. It's estimated that nearly 40% of the people in Banda Aceh, which is the big city that was hit by the tsunami, died. And the distance between where you died and where you were safe was maybe less than a meter if you were in the tsunami you were likely going to die if you were sitting there next to the tsunami you were going to live and most of the people that got caught in the tsunami didn't just get injured but they were killed usually the injuries are two to three times what the death rate is and this was not like that at all and in the mokum people because they evacuated the coast because they self-evacuated instead of having to wait for a warning to come from outside they only had i think three or four casualties and the three or four casualties were from people who went down early to look and see what had happened and by that time the tsunami wave had moved from sumatra hit india and reflected back and they were on the coast in the village when that second wave came, that reflection wave. I just read that it took 11 hours for the first wave to go and hit the east coast of India. So we're talking almost a full day when that second wave returned. Yeah. So they waited and then they went down and they thought it was safe. Ron Harris hadn't been alone in often assuming that an academic's job is to stay in an academic lane and publish in academic journals, but he abandoned that attitude after the fateful Boxing Day disaster. When I asked him to elaborate on the common disconnect between what we learn and actually helping others with what we learn, he drew a straight line from a sense of calling to actual engagement because a sense of calling alone is of little use and Ron feels this acutely Feeling called Feeling called to do what I do Especially when I got to Indonesia and I had the assumption that surely other people have been working on all this other stuff and finding out that nobody was. And even if they were, they weren't taking it to the next level, which is to actually go to the place and communicate to the people in their language and at their level to help them build stories like the Mocum people. And still to this day, most people in this field, when I go to meetings and there's a symposium on reducing loss of lives from hazards, almost every talk is assessment. Like what I did when I published a paper, there's this seismic gap out here and it's likely going to have a big earthquake. It could happen today, it could happen in 100 years, but it's going to go eventually because it's building up strain and then just walk off and assume that somebody's going to pick the pieces of what i set up and somehow go and communicate them to the people who are in harm's way in the harm's way is a phrase that you have used now in the establishment of a non-profit right and its mission is expressly to do this communication you're talking about communication and implementation of risk reduction in harm's way advocates for something called 20 20 20 and i just walk us through what that those numbers 20 20 20 mean so in the process of trying to communicate the risk to the people locally and also what to do about it we had these social scientists with us and we do a survey before the talk then we do a survey afterwards to try to assess the understanding and they showed me the data they're like look they're not learning anything from your approach and the reason why is because it's way too technical and they're just not up to this and probably the same would happen here in the u.s and so we got together and brainstormed and they're like look you gotta to reduce the entire tsunami science into one sentence and i said how about three numbers they're like that's even better you usually have about 20 minutes based on all of our tsunami models that we've done and also based on on historical accounts they're like well how long would it would the ground have to shake in order to create a tsunami because they have earthquakes there all the time you don't want them to be like evacuating every week or so and i said well it has to be at least a magnitude 7 which would mean it would shake for 20 seconds at that time they were going to say it's like 20 20 vision i said we need one more 20 and that's how far they need to go inland and at least 20 meters elevation so 20 seconds of shaking 20 minutes to get to 20 meters elevation if the people in the banda ache earthquake and indian ocean tsunami in 2004 would have known that tens of thousands of lives would have been saved with that one bit of information has that one bit of information yet played out in such a way with real events that lives have been saved yeah it has there was a tsunami and earthquake in 2018 in sulawesi indonesia so they had university and others had already learned about the 2020 hadn't been like broadcast all over the city there's a video of a man who as soon as he felt the earthquake climbed up into a high parking garage next to the coast he was probably about 30 meters up and the people below are still going about their daily business because the ground's shaking it stopped some of them are probably going home to check on family or whatever and he's yelling from the top of this parking garage because he could see the tsunami coming tsunami tsunami tsunami people were just ignoring him people like getting in and out of a bus like as if nothing's happening some people looked up and saw and he's like tsunami tsunami tsunami tsunami right and then you see the tsunami getting closer and closer and closer and then it just comes and takes them out, and then all you hear is him sobbing. It's a huge, impactful video. But some people were saved because he knew what to do. A similar event happened in another Indonesian town called Negeri Lima, where a landslide had dammed up a river. But it became apparent to people connected with the non-profit in harm's way that the earthen dam would not hold. so there we had an earthquake during the rainy season which meant that there's lots of slopes that are unstable and so you commonly have these landslides that come across and dam up rivers there's so much water flow that they start to go over the dam and can break through the dam catastrophically and go down and there's usually a village at the end of the river where it runs into the sea and so some of the people we had trained who are still working for in harm's way went there saw the situation said look we need to practice some evacuation and so they built some evacuation signs and then they tried to have an evacuation drill but not very many people took it seriously didn't show up this like the whole time of this is going on the water is getting higher and higher and higher and higher and higher on the landslide reservoir. And they had somebody monitoring it up there. So our workers went to the imams in Negri, Lima, and said, look, the people we're talking to are taking a very laissez-faire attitude towards this. And they bought into it and started beating the drums, which is the signal that there's a gathering that needs to take place. And they told them, look, you really need to practice this because we don't know how long that's going to last. So they had a really successful evacuation drill. And then within like three days, the call comes out. It's breaking. It's breaking. It's breaking. And then it just broke catastrophically. And this 25-meter wave came down the drainage. It took seven minutes for it to get to the city. And only 10 people died because in that seven minutes, they had evacuated over 450 homes. because the flood came down and took all those 450 homes and just dumped them into the ocean. Casualties were people who were handicapped. One was deaf, a person taking care of the deaf. Some older people, it was hard for them to get out of the way in seven minutes. But 450 homes with maybe three to five people in each home, that's a couple thousand people that were saved just by what that one person did. Back in 2004, when the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami hit, Facebook was in its infancy, Instagram was not a thing, people didn't even really text much. So even though we had the Internet, word did not travel instantaneously as it does now. But social media can really play a big part of getting the word out today, about anything. It certainly can help spread the word about disaster preparedness. Consider something that happened about a decade ago. Ron and an Indonesian graduate student were giving a lecture at a university on the island of Lombok, Indonesia. The university had some journalist students who were there, and they published it on social media that we were expecting to have a magnitude 9 event on the Java Trench, our evidence for it, and what we needed to do. we had 50 000 hits before midnight and the central government found out about this and they asked the geological and geophysical agency why haven't you guys told us this so the people at the geophysical survey kind of got in trouble and then they published their own evidence showing it i guess the only reason they were keeping it from the people because i've asked a few of them this was they didn't want to cause mass panic. But that's what the social media post took care of. Signs in this community remain posted for all to read, reminding people of the importance of 2020-20. When the unthinkable actually happens, they'll understand what's at stake and quickly move to higher ground. But my favorite example about preparing for a tsunami using the catchy little phrase 2020-20, well, it's just got to be this one. There's this one city, Pochettan, that has a 20-20-20 parade every year. They dress up. Everybody brings the bikes that they have. They dress up the bikes in these posters that have 20-20-20 on it and waves and the green queen of the sea on there. And they ride through the city like a tsunami. They stay together. They start at the coast. They ride through the city and they go up each of the streets. and if they tag you, you're dead and you have to sit down or lay down. It's a big party every year and they came up with this all on their own. So the Moken may well have their mythological notions of a monster wave called Laboon that devours people. But I'm really rather fond of this new tradition of the 2020-20 parade. Now, what if people in places like Pacitan can't physically move on the terrain 20 meters higher. Well, in those cases, mitigation efforts have tried to bring elevation to the people. They also planted a bunch of trees right along the coast between the city and the waves. These are casuarina trees, which are really strong. They're stronger than palms, but palms are also good. And most of the foliage is up high. So when the tsunami comes, It reduces the intensity of the wave by almost an order of magnitude. And they planted those trees right after the 2004 tsunami. So now they're huge and a very, very effective barrier. But the bad news is that the people who live along the river where there's no tree barriers, the tsunamis go right up the rivers because they're the lowest places on shore. And there's a lot of people that live close to that river. and we've tried to find ways to get them to safe ground and there's no way they're going to make it. So each place that we go to, we identify what we call the death zone where people live but there's no way in 20 minutes that they're going to get to a safe place. And so what do you do? You build a high-rise hotel there and you do vertical evacuation. So the hotels will withstand the tsunami? They have to build it so it can by putting pilings, you know, tens of meters down because it's unconsolidated stuff. There were mosques in the 2004 tsunami that survived because they had an open ground floor plan. That's the key. It's just pillars. And the tsunami just went right through the bottom, you know, kind of like if you're trying to mitigate for a flood and you have houses on stilts, nothing for the current to really grab onto. Ron Harris doesn't operate like somebody who has all the answers. His humility is readily apparent. He routinely points away from himself to the Mokun, to the inhabitants of Pacitan. He always tries to understand who and why and where and how. But while he's personally focused on improving survival rates, doing his part, he also wants to see more risk analysis and disaster mitigation performed by Indonesians themselves, by those very communities that are situated near the fault lines and ocean fronts, near volcanoes, near vulnerable reservoirs. Preparedness and mitigation may well involve things like the 2020-20 plan, the strategic planting of trees. Maybe there's a more sophisticated plan involving perhaps the military. Now, even though Southeast Asia and Indonesia have always been at significant risk for natural disasters, Ron pointed out to me that before 1998, very little was being published from Indonesian universities about these natural hazards. And that has been changing. They started to pick up because we started to help the universities start a major on natural disaster mitigation. An actual major as of course I started Which was multidisciplinary It wasn just the geology It wasn just the geophysics It also had to do with public safety and public health and clear communication And so people, when they were undergraduates, they would get their degree in disaster mitigation, and they were finding that there were more people who wanted to hire those than in the oil industry or mining industry. And then they got graduate degrees and started doing research on this, and it just took off. It's a whole new discipline then at that point. this in java in a volcano called kilut there was a faculty member who was heading the disaster mitigation major and the requirement for seniors is to spend a semester somewhere in indonesia helping out with what they just learned in their geology training these two undergraduate students decided they would go and make a geologic map of mount kilut to see where most of the youngest flows were coming down and then they went down into the city that's below the volcano that had been wiped out three times before and told them that it's been wiped out three times before and also they did an evacuation drill and then we're talking about over a hundred thousand people that lived within the red zone which is within 10 kilometers of the summit five years after they had done this work, the volcano started to wake up and lots of seismicity, meaning that the magma was moving towards the summit. And then they started seeing some ash and they immediately went into the action plan, which is to get all these troop carriers from the military to come in and pick up people and bring them out. So three hours after the evacuation started, the volcano erupted. Huge eruption that caused big ash flows to come down the side of the mountain that they had mapped. Over 5,000 homes were destroyed, like incinerated, vaporized by this ash flow. Only five people died because of those two undergraduate students who had not only assessed the hazard, but it also helped the people understand what they needed to do to get out of harm's way. That is awe-inspiring to me. Just that little bit of knowledge went so far to save so many lives. In just a moment here on Constant Wonder, we're going to hear about a time not that long ago when Ron Harris nearly lost his own life. What was it that kept him going, gave hope, and sustained him when he thought he was at death's door? I'm Marcus Smith. I'd like to introduce you to another show from the BYU Radio family of podcasts, The Lisa Show, hosted by comedian, believer, and single mother Lisa Valentine Clark. The Lisa Show delves into most any challenge that meets us in the course of our lives, especially challenges in the realm of human relationships. Whether it's parenting, mental health questions, or social issues, Lisa and her council of moms are willing to tackle it. Figuring life out is vexing enough without losing an ability to laugh or cry together or just plain talk things through. The Lisa Show. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. We now return to Constant Wonder. Ron Harris is 68 years old. He's trim, athletic, and has bright blue eyes. If you're walking beside him and he wants to turn those eyes on you, He does that rather stiffly, like somebody who just woke up with a bad crick in their neck. And that's because his neck was fused after he broke it while surfing in Bali in 2018. He was at a beach not far from the international airport, just hours before he was due to fly back home from one of his research trips. He nearly always took a day to surf at the end of such a trip, and it should have just worked out fine, with flights coming into Bali from other parts of Indonesia, arriving usually in the morning and flights outbound for the U.S. usually leaving at about midnight. I wanted him to share with us the details of this particular day in 2018. Actually, the last time he would ever surf. Not just because of the drama involved, no. What happened to him when he was thrown from his board and submerged in the waves that day. That experience ties right into his sense of calling. Surfing was awesome. there were these huge waves i hadn't seen waves that big any time that i had been there before i was having the time of my life i finally you know got tired so i was sitting there on the beach the waves changed so there was a better barrel so i thought oh i'll go out and get a couple more runs on those barrel waves and one of them just i got too far ahead of the wave and so it just face planted me or head planted me on the bottom of the ocean and it knocked me out because I woke up and I was in the middle of a tumultuous wave fortunately I don't know how I hadn't swallowed any water but I couldn't figure out where I was at first there's something else that happened that I'll talk about in a second but I finally figured out what had happened and Fortunately, my board was tethered to my wrist, and so I was able to get on it because my head and neck was just spasming with pain, and I couldn't lift my neck up, so I laid it on my board and paddled in. I was out there by myself, so there was nobody really to take care of me. so I returned the board to the person I'd rented it from and then I walked from the beach to the hotel room holding my head up because my head was flopped over like this I had to hold it up as I walked and I got to the hotel and I had sand all over me so I just kind of slithered into this swimming pool at the hotel to get all the sand off got my key went up to my room tried to take my surf shirt off and it was stuck to my skin because it was so wet and my neck was just spasming i don't know how i got that off but there was this feeling of you better be careful taking that off so then i got my phone and my passport I asked for a taxi to bring me to some apothecary where I could find a neck brace and some pain medication because my flight left in like five hours well the taxi's like there's no place that you can get to either of those except for the hospital so bring me to the hospital and when you have a broken neck any kind of movement is just almost unbearable pain just that ride in the taxi even though i was telling the taxi to go slow any kind of bump it just so i go into the hospital and uh the er doctor was like we need to take an x-ray i can't just give you pain medication and a brace and tell you to go on your way when he x-rayed it he saw i was broken in four places my c1 and c2 he's like how did you get here i got out of the water i walked he's like cringing the whole time I'm telling him this story he goes you shouldn't even be alive let alone be able to do all of that so but that moment when I was in the water and I was just coming to I had this overwhelming feeling of peace that no matter what happened everything was going to be okay it was the weirdest feeling I can't remember ever feeling like that before in my life especially in a situation like that where you could be panicking. Just this overwhelming calm feeling of just, okay, find a way out. It was, I don't know how to explain it. If I were to hazard giving any kind of explanation in his behalf, I might well say that Ron still had work to do after 2018. when I asked him if his successes with the non-profit in harm's way to some degree offset the difficulty of wishing he'd done more ahead of the Boxing Day tsunami for the vulnerable populations of Southeast Asia. Well, his reply was full of self-effacement and simple generosity towards other people engaged in this work. The fact that these successes have happened because of the way I pivoted and the way other people have pivoted. It's like what Victor Hugo said when he said that armies cannot change an idea when its time has come. When the time for that idea is there, it doesn't matter what anybody does. And I feel like I'm a part of that. The idea was, look, we need to do more than just assess these hazards and then ask people why they didn't listen. Because that's not what's going on. We're negligent. When you work for nearly three decades in broadcasting, you might get a chance to interview people, as I have. A whole lot of them, actually. And in Ron Harris, I've met a rare specimen of humanity. He's a person who, with stunning humility, has reversed the conventional relationship between expert and pupil. We found that disaster mitigation has got enough traction that it's actually being practiced by people who are doing it in their own way and making it personal for their community. I have three Indonesian ex-graduate students that I pay $500 about every three or four months for them to go around and make sure that this is going on. And they were telling me these success stories that they would go to a village and the village they had just been at, there was somebody from the other village who was listening. And by that time they got to the second village, most people were already singing this tsunami song that we teach everybody about what to do during the tsunami. And so I thought, I just want to go listen. I want to hear what they know and what they've done. and we rated the cities and they were like what was that city's rating compared to ours you know a little bit of competition yeah sure good competition so now they're on this path this five-year path to try to get to where the best people were the best communities that had taken this the most seriously by showing them look this is what this community's done that's the only talking that we did we listened and listened and said look these people have the same problem you guys have and this is what they're doing. And that made so much difference. It wasn't us telling them what to do. It was the community down the road that was telling them what to do. So refreshing to be involved with something that's got a life of its own, which is another source of awe. When you see something that you've done get a life of its own and you can just stand back and watch it go. That's probably one of the most powerful sources of awe, I feel. Ron Harris is a professor of geology here at Brigham Young University. He's also the founder of the nonprofit In Harm's Way, which prepares people and communities to protect themselves against the potential catastrophe of natural disasters. What you're hearing right now is the 20-20-20 song with lyrics in Indonesian, so I don't expect you to understand them. I just wanted you to have a chance to listen to a little of it while I bring this all to a close with this thought. Ron is someone who through his professional career has come to love and understand the people he has wanted to serve and now finds himself looking up to them. This episode was produced here in our studios with Teneri Taylor as the producer and production assistants from Hayley Harris and Mamie Teoples. Sound design was by Ta-hyun Kim I'm Marcus Smith Constant Wonder is a production of BYU Radio