Indonesia Uses Mosque Loudspeakers for Earthquake Warnings

Indonesia, with help from Japanese experts, is pursuing a five-year plan to use mosque loudspeakers as an earthquake warning system.

According to Ambassador Arjan, quoted by the Guardian, Indonesia is in a five-year pilot project investigating whether loudspeakers used to broadcast the call to prayer can help warn in remote areas or not.

Scientists working on an early warning system in earthquake-prone Indonesia have taken a different and spiritual approach to designing a network of warning sirens that can reach even the most remote communities. They hope to save human lives by using mosques.

Inoue Hiroshi, the head of this project, said in an interview with the Guardian: Every community has a mosque. This pilot project is the initiative of this Japanese scientist specializing in natural disasters; who says he came up with the idea nearly two decades ago while researching deadly earthquakes in Sumatra.

Inoue, of the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Japan's Kyoto University, is working with the Indonesian government to investigate whether the country could implement a system similar to Japan's early warning system.

He says about the devastating 2009 earthquake in West Sumatra that left at least 1,000 dead: I thought to myself if Indonesia had such a service and people had received the warning before the tremors started, many of those hundreds of people would not have lost their lives.

Indonesia's crisis management organization faces the challenge of vast distances and remote areas, but has the advantage of having a network of loudspeakers that are pre-deployed and regularly serviced; A possibility that many other countries do not take advantage of.

With the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia has hundreds of thousands of mosques where the call to prayer is played five times a day. This pilot project has already connected several mosques to its network of seismic sensors.

In order for an earthquake early warning system to save lives, two critical factors are necessary: having a network of warning devices and their proper functioning. The advantage of mosque speakers is that they are pre-existing and well-maintained, says Inoue. In any crisis management infrastructure, maintenance is a major challenge. But the maintenance of mosque loudspeakers is done by the people themselves.

Many modern disaster preparedness strategies are based on the use of mobile phones; However, these methods are vulnerable, because the occurrence of an earthquake can disrupt the communication infrastructure.

The country has had a tsunami early warning system since 2008, but according to Andy Eka Sakia, a senior researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency (affiliated to the Indonesian government) and the Indonesian head of the joint research team, the earthquake plan could be considered a "major development".

While tsunamis affect coastal areas and their occurrence can be predicted from a few minutes to even a few hours in advance, earthquake waves move at an extraordinary speed on the ground; Sakya says that a village located 50 kilometers from the epicenter may have only 5 to 10 seconds to react.

He says: This plan is still in the initial stage and no warning will be issued to the public at the moment. The ultimate goal is to inform people so that they can react as quickly as possible.

This project, which will continue until 2030, also considers the installation of warning systems on school loudspeakers and the use of radio and television broadcasts.