Two weeks after the Flores quake, 180,000 people are still in shelters

The rescue phase on Flores is over, and what has replaced it is slower and harder to photograph. Nikkei Asia reports that two weeks after the magnitude 7.7 earthquake of 15 August, people in remote villages of East Nusa Tenggara are still struggling to find food and clean water. About 180,000 people are living in makeshift shelters, and aftershocks keep arriving, so even families whose houses are standing are often afraid to sleep inside them.

The part that turns a bad month into a bad year is the weather. Nikkei says a "super El Nino" is likely to deepen the crisis. El Nino is a pattern in the Pacific Ocean that pulls rain away from Indonesia; the strong version of it means a dry season that starts earlier, lasts longer and empties wells and water tanks that would normally refill. A hard drought would land on a province that already cannot feed and water the people it has under canvas.

Two weeks is roughly the point where foreign coverage of a disaster usually stops. That is what makes the report worth reading. It is the outside view catching up with the slow part, after the rescue teams have gone, when tens of thousands of families still have no roof, no reliable water, and a dry season in front of them.

Why it matters

If you have relatives on Flores, the useful thing to send now is not rescue equipment but the boring stuff that lasts: water containers, roofing sheets, and cash to an established relief group, which moves faster than boxes. If you are following the recovery from a distance, the number to watch over the next two months is not the death toll but how many of the 180,000 are still in shelters when the drought sets in. A shelter that was survivable in August becomes something else when the wells run dry.