An earthquake of magnitude 7.7 hit Flores in East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) last week. Thousands of aftershocks followed, along with tsunami warnings. Houses destroyed. Hospital ceilings collapsed. Roads disappeared under landslides. At least 75 people died across Manggarai, Nagekeo, and the rest of NTT.
Over 27,000 families were displaced from their homes — gathered under plastic tarps in swamped local emergency centers — as officials arrived with supply drops and the usual promises of rapid reconstruction.
None of this was unpredictable. Indonesia is a disaster-prone country. We have seen the country endure countless disasters: floods, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, and forest fires. Yet, the same scenarios played out one disaster after another. Government responses often stop at delivering aid and photo-ops. They seldom reach real steps toward disaster resilience.
After last year’s devastating Sumatra floods, the government has talked of upgraded early-warning systems, enforced building codes, and fortified regional response budgets. Yet, almost a year on, thousands of people in Sumatra still live in temporary shelters, waiting on aid that never arrived, sitting next to infrastructure that never got rebuilt.
If the Sumatra flood was supposed to be the moment the state finally learned something about preparedness and resilience, the NTT earthquake proves it didn’t. It just waited for the cameras to point somewhere else – until the next disaster happens.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, wedged against active fault lines like the Flores Back-Arc Thrust, where tectonic activity happened and caused the latest earthquake. So an earthquake in our archipelago is no mystery. And yet the state seems to treat every earthquake as a shock nobody could have anticipated, as though our geography changed overnight.
National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) acting spokesperson Berton Panjaitan admitted to the press that the agency struggled to deliver aid to affected areas because of Flores’ difficult geography and landslide-destroyed road conditions. In some villages in Manggarai, for example, journalists reporting from the field observed no BNPB-branded orange tents in emergency camps, forcing displaced people to erect makeshift tents from bamboo and tarps.
Underneath these seemingly “acceptable” difficulties is a structural issue. This year, BNPB underwent a massive budget cut, from Rp 2.01 trillion in 2025 to Rp 491 billion in the 2026 state budget. In fact, the agency’s budget has decreased every year since 2021. Crazy to think that a disaster-prone country keeps cutting costs for disaster mitigation. Yes, Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa has reassured that the government has put aside Rp 5 trillion emergency disaster relief fund from the state budget, ready to use and can even be topped up when requested. But without transparent and consistent criteria, national sign-off to access urgent disaster funds might just add another bureaucratic layer in time of need.
Speaking of geography, physical isolation from landslides cutting off supply roads, severed cables, and entire power grids going down often gets talked about as an inevitable impact of nature’s wrath. But what it really shows is an infrastructure system with no backup.
Look at what happened in Palue Island, the region closest to the earthquake epicenter. The island went completely dark, literally and figuratively, as the quake knocked out the power grid and telecommunication towers. Coordination between responders fell apart. Villages lost contact with each other. Aid arrived late as ships were docked due to tsunami warnings. If only there were budgets for redundancies like satellite and power-grid backups for local government offices...
As with what happened in Sumatra, this natural disaster episode is a picture of regional autonomy meeting its limits. Yes, local governments are supposed to run the emergency response, but provinces like NTT have thin local revenue to begin with. Asking a cash-strapped regency to run field hospitals, shelter logistics, and crisis communications on its own, without real transfers from Jakarta, is an exhibit of failing decentralization.
After all, what incentives do Jakarta elites have for disaster preparedness and resilience? Handing out relief boxes and cutting a ribbon on a rebuilt clinic gets you on the news, but not funding seismic research or keeping a satellite network running in the background. It’s no surprise the state keeps investing in the visible, photogenic version of disaster response, while neglecting the “boring” parts that actually save lives before the ground moves.
We should be fair and acknowledge that disaster response, especially in a province with difficult terrain spread across hundreds of islands like NTT, is genuinely hard. Building redundant infrastructure everywhere is expensive in a way that’s easy to say and brutal to fund. But “expensive and hard” describes almost every serious governance problem. It shouldn’t be an excuse to do nothing. If anything, it should be a reason to start.
Sumatra should have forced this reckoning already. After the disaster hit in November 2025, it took the central government eight months to even propose more budget for Sumatra reconstruction. The questions are: in the months people waited for Jakarta to make a decision, how many lives were lost? How much hardship did the people have to endure on top of an already devastating disaster? And, most importantly, how much public trust has diminished?
We can’t allow NTT to be “abandoned” the same way once the story goes cold and the news cycle moves on. Things need to happen even if it’s unglamorous: ensuring the state allocates enough budget for disaster preparedness and allows room to build redundant infrastructure, such as backup power grids, especially for hospitals and crisis centers on islands at risk of isolation. The state should provide non-negotiable central funding for Regional Disaster Mitigation Agency (BPBD) offices in poor, high-risk provinces, instead of leaving them to fend for themselves.
Indonesia won’t stop having earthquakes. Whether they keep turning into mass casualties is a choice the state makes every year it doesn’t fund the “boring” stuff.