LAKE SINGKARAK, Indonesia — Mardianis recalls reading the Quran with his parents and two children here on the western shore of Lake Singkarak before the desperate cries of galodoh. A dark wall of rock barreled down the hillside as the family rushed to higher ground. Mardianis remembers the flood careening into the family’s small food store, and the totality of destruction to the community mosque. Dozens died here in Guguak Malalo ward, Tanah Datar district, in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra, during the flash flood, known locally as galodoh. That disaster occurred 25 years ago, but a layer of trauma lies beneath the surface of this lakeside community. “If there’s heavy rain and it lasts a while, I won’t dare spend the evening at the food stall,” Mardianis told Mongabay Indonesia. Many here blame the flash flood on blast explosives used to cut 17 kilometers (10 miles) of tunnels to channel water from the lake to a hydroelectric power plant. Malin, a young resident of Guguak Malalo, said the intake for the hydropower plant had introduced new currents that made fishing more difficult. “Many of the water sources were lost because of the tunnel that was built from Singkarak to Lubuk Alung,” Ardinis Arbain, a hydrologist at West Sumatra’s Andalas University, told Mongabay Indonesia, referring to a town to the west of the lake. A development plan prepared by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the country’s overseas development aid agency, showed only one in five homes in the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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