74 The EconomistAugust 10th 2019
T
hree timesthe government asked him and he turned the job
down, not wanting to become a mouthpiece for them; but in
the end they pressed him, and in 2010 Sutopo Purwo Nugroho be-
came the new spokesman for Indonesia’s Disaster Mitigation
Agency (bnpb). Almost his first job was to persuade 350,000 peo-
ple to move away from Mount Merapi on the island of Java. The
great, stately, active volcano had been monitored for a long time.
People believed it hosted a sultanate of sometimes peevish spirits
who had to be soothed, not shunned, when they were angry. His
job was to persuade the locals to forget that, and just leave.
He gave the warning late on October 24th. By the evening of Oc-
tober 25th, when the mountain blew its top, the bnpbhad overseen
the evacuation of almost everyone. (The tight time-lapse was ideal;
if he’d waited longer, the evacuees would have started to wander
back.) He was there when grey ash started falling on the heads of
the elderly villagers he was leading out. The sight made him cry.
Worse, though, was the fact that more than 350 people ignored his
warnings, preferring to stay on the right side of the spirits.
Before he arrived at the agency, forecasts of natural disasters
were a fairly random occurrence. Often they were missed, or the
government panicked without reason, dragging along a public
panicked by hoaxes posted online. Indonesia was a country of
17,000 islands, perched on the “Ring of Fire” at the edge of the Pa-
cific, with 127 active volcanoes. They could erupt at any time, and
the same sliding plates unleashed earthquakes, landslides and
tsunamis, adding up to more than 2,300 emergencies a year. As his
job went on, the tally got worse: 2018 was the deadliest for natural
disasters in over a decade, with more than 4,600 people killed. YetIndonesians barely knew what they faced. A poll of his many Twit-
ter followers revealed that 86% had never had disaster training.
So first of all he provided clarity, turning data from monitors on
the ground into clear statements to the press. There were plenty of
those, and 500 press releases in 2018 alone. Then he did some edu-
cating. He filled the bnpb building with dioramas, mud-crusted
relics from landslides, notices tipped sideways and backdrops of
devastation into which visitors could insert themselves, as rescu-
ers, for selfies. (That might seem silly, but he liked to pose in them
himself, smiling a bit self-consciously; it all helped to show
schoolchildren, in particular, what being caught up in a disaster
was like.) He shrugged off the occasional government grumble
about being “too naughty”. After all, before he took the job he had
already publicised the fact that cracks in a dam were caused by offi-
cial negligence. They knew he would be a handful.
Social media, though, was his trump card. Almost all Indone-
sians now had mobile phones. He ran seven WhatsApp groups to
exchange data with monitors and journalists, who could always
get “Pak Topo” when they needed him, and he used Twitter to keep
the public up to speed. Among his posts of good meals, get-togeth-
ers, his spoiled cat Mozza and a gecko licking his toothbrush, he
tweeted warnings. “Pyroclastic material from Mount Karangetang-
...can reach 700-1,200 degrees centigrade. Trust me when I say,
don’t touch it.” “Celebrating Eid on Mount Bromo is safe. As long as
you are not within 1km of the crater...its charms are waiting for
you.” Expanding his brief, he urged people to clean their gutters,
tweeting a picture of a python being pulled from a drain: “Don’t
just write ‘No snakes’. Snakes can’t read.” He also told the young to
work hard at school, as he had, getting over his hang-up that he was
poor and ugly with diligence and lots of hair oil.
For those who wanted them, he tweeted challenging scientific
facts: diagrams of volcanoes changing shape before they erupted,
and a long thread about volcanic mud. He was not a volcanologist,
leaving that job to academic monitors in airless sheds at the foot of
uneasy mountains; his training was in hydrology, and he had wast-
ed many years at another agency trying to make rain. But he did
spend most of his time at the bnpb staring at wall screens where
white lights flashed on the dozens of volcanoes that were active or
might become so (a good test for presidential candidates, he
mused once, would be to try to name them all), and leaping to his
ever-buzzing phone. He needed to watch both the earth moving
and fake news accumulating, like steam, in the Twittersphere.
Here, he worked fast. Incipient panics got short shrift: “No tsu-
nami seen in Banggai. Please don’t spread hoaxes.” Fake images
were denounced. (“This eruption is in South America. Ignore and
don’t spread.”) Talk of “portents” was firmly shot down. (“The
mountain peak is clouded with altocumulus lenticularis...due to a
whirlwind at the top...No connection with mysticism or politics
ahead of the election.”) As a result, he helped Indonesians feel saf-
er. Jokowi, the president, publicly praised him, which was almost
as good a moment as when he at last met the singer Raisa, on whom
he had such a crush that he included her Twitter handle in more
than 90 of his disaster tweets. He claimed his only motive was to
get them retweeted to her 8m followers. Of course!
With all this whirling round him, he was also cheerfully facing
disaster of another sort. In 2018 he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung
cancer, though he had never smoked. He could not have foreseen
it; Nature was unpredictable. Science helped him understand it,
but could not cure it. Allah had planned it, just as He had planned
that others should die in earthquakes and tsunamis. Many Indone-
sians, he had discovered, found it more comforting to think that
way. So, after the first cruel shock, did he. His tweets of destroyed
places now included mriscans of his lungs.
Among the 350 people he had not been able to save from Merapi
was the guardian of the mountain. Slowly, his house had filled up
with grey ash. Before the rest of the villagers made their way down
to safety, he simply told them his time had come to go. 7Sutopo Purwo Nugroho (“Pak Topo”), Indonesia’s disaster
spokesman, died on July 7th, aged 49Under the volcanoes
Obituary Sutopo Purwo Nugroho
Correction:Our obituary of Robert Morgenthau (August 3rd) stated that the
Bank of Credit and Commerce International lost $15bn. This was an estimate at
the time of the bank’s indictment in 1991. The known figure to date is $8.4bn.