Listen: sometimes Mother Nature doesn’t whisper. Sometimes
she screams.
At the end of November 2025—and if you’re the praying kind,
you might want to get down on your knees right about now—the island of Sumatra
learned this lesson the hard way. Two tropical cyclones, Tisoy and 95B (and
doesn’t it figure that even disasters get bureaucratic names these days?),
converged like something out of a nightmare you can’t quite remember when you
wake up sweating at three a.m. The rain came down in sheets, then curtains,
then walls of water that seemed to have no beginning and no end.
What followed was biblical. Flash floods. Landslides that
swallowed homes like hungry mouths. More than a hundred souls gone—just like
that, reader, snuffed out like candles in a draft.
The worst of it hit four regencies in North Sumatra: Central
Tapanuli, South Tapanuli, North Tapanuli, and the city of Sibolga. In Medan,
nineteen districts went under, including—and this is the kicker—the Governor’s
own residence. Even the big shots weren’t safe. The water doesn’t give a damn
about your title or your fancy address.
Up in Banda Aceh, the drainage system choked on the overflow
from the Krueng Aceh and Krueng Inong rivers. Every single district flooded.
Every. Single. One.
Down in Padang, the Lubuk Minturun River came roaring down
from the highlands carrying timber and mud like some demented delivery service,
smashing through homes, filling them to the rafters with nature’s revenge.
Phone lines went dead. Roads turned into rivers or simply
disappeared. Families ran for the forests and hills with nothing but the
clothes on their backs and the hope—thin as paper, fragile as glass—that they
might live to see another sunrise.
The Geography of Doom
Now here’s the thing about Aceh, Medan, and Padang—three
provincial capitals that got hammered at the same time. Their geography is both
their blessing and their curse, like a beautiful woman with a mean streak a
mile wide.
All three cities sit in natural basins. Think of them as
bowls, and when it rains hard enough, those bowls fill up. Simple as that.
Deadly as that.
Banda Aceh squats on the floodplain of the Krueng Aceh
River, flat as a pancake at just 0.80 meters above sea level. Seventy percent
of the city lies below five meters. When heavy rain hits the highlands in Aceh
Besar, Pidie, or Aceh Jaya, the water reaches the city center in less than six
hours. You could set your watch by it—if you had time to run.
The ground beneath Banda Aceh tells its own story, if you
know how to read it. Scientists call it a graben—a basin formed when tectonic
plates decided to take a dive during the Pliocene era. The plain was built up
over thousands of years from river sediment, layer upon layer, like geological
lasagna. Beautiful, maybe. But when the rains come? A death trap.
Medan, founded in 1875 (back when people still thought they
could tame nature with a good plan and some elbow grease), sits on lowlands
between 2.5 and 37.5 meters above sea level. Two major rivers—the Deli and the
Belawan—rush down from the highlands toward the coast, channeling water like
arteries pumping blood. Except this blood drowns you.
The soil beneath Medan is clay and alluvium, recent river
deposits that soak up water about as well as a plastic sheet. When it rains,
the water has nowhere to go but sideways and down, straight into the rivers
that are already swollen and angry.
A study from 2023 found that the Setia Budi area has these
little pockets in the landscape—depressions where water pools and sits because
gravity can’t do its job. Without massive artificial drainage (and we’ll get to
that), the whole area is basically a retention pond waiting to happen. One
district alone saw 1.46 square kilometers go under. Do the math. It’s not
pretty.
Padang’s got hills—over sixty percent of the city is carved
into slopes and ridges—but its coastal plains are just as vulnerable.
Twenty-two percent of the city sits at 0 to 25 meters above sea level, and
wouldn’t you know it, that’s where most people live. Because of course it is.
The rivers—Batang Arau, Batang Kandis, Batang Kuranji—come
racing down from the Bukit Barisan mountains like water from a broken dam. When
the forests upstream are intact, they slow things down. But when those forests
are gone (and oh boy, are they gone), the water hits the coastal plains like a
freight train with no brakes.
The Dutch Knew Better (Sort Of)
Here’s where it gets interesting. Back during the Dutch
colonial era (and say what you want about colonizers, but they understood
drainage), these three cities were perfect for development. Strategic coastal
locations for trade. Flat terrain for building. Natural water flow that could
be managed—if you were smart about it.
The Dutch were smart about it. At least at first.
In Padang, after the great floods of September 28–29,
1907—when houses and roads got obliterated and the Chinese and Malay commercial
districts took it on the chin—the colonial government said enough is enough.
They started digging a massive drainage canal in October 1911, called it Banda
Bakali (a Minangkabau term for an artificial river, because even infrastructure
needs poetry sometimes).
The canal diverted the Batang Arau River, sending it on a
6.8-kilometer detour north with a width of twenty meters, dumping into the
Indian Ocean near Purus Beach. They finished in 1918, and flooding in Padang
dropped off dramatically. Oh, there were still floods until 1938, but nothing
like before.
Medan had a similar story. The city was founded after the
capital of Deli got moved from Labuhan in 1879 because—surprise—Labuhan kept
flooding. But here’s the dark part: Medan’s drainage system was built to
protect European assets and facilitate the export of tobacco and rubber. The
Europeans lived on high ground with perfect drainage while indigenous residents
and contract laborers got stuck in the lowlands, in the mud, in the flood
zones.
That’s capitalism for you. Always has been.
Banda Aceh didn’t get Dutch-era canals for complicated
historical reasons. The city developed slowly, limping along as an
administrative center. Then in 1978, after a massive flood caused by
deforestation in the highlands (causing 1.4 billion rupiah in damage—and that’s
1978 money, folks), the government finally built the Krueng Aceh floodway. A
9.6-kilometer canal completed in 1993, designed to channel 900 cubic meters of
floodwater per second.
For a while, it worked. The canals in all three cities
worked.
But here’s the thing about infrastructure: it only works if
you maintain it. If you protect what feeds it. If you don’t treat the land
upstream like it’s infinite and indestructible.
The Trees Are Gone and So Is Our Future
The Deli River Basin, which feeds Medan, is basically dead.
In 2015, according to a study by the Japan International Cooperation Agency,
only 5.6 percent of its original 48,000 hectares of forest remained. The soil
can’t absorb rain anymore. Every downpour becomes instant runoff, a flash flood
waiting to happen.
Between 2022 and 2024, Aceh, North Sumatra, and West Sumatra
lost more than 300,000 hectares of primary wet forest. North Sumatra got hit
worst—390,000 hectares gone, one-quarter of the total loss. West Sumatra and
Aceh each lost 320,000 hectares.
The reasons vary—legal and illegal logging in Aceh and West
Sumatra, residential and infrastructure expansion in North Sumatra—but the
result is the same. The forests that once held back the water, that absorbed
rainfall like a sponge, that kept the soil stable and the landslides at
bay—they’re gone. Converted into eucalyptus plantations, hydropower projects,
gold mines, roads, buildings, shopping centers.
In Medan, between 2008 and 2013, land use for settlements
and built-up areas increased by 96.55 percent. Conservation areas—mixed
gardens, green spaces—fell by nearly sixty percent.
More concrete. More asphalt. Less soil. Less absorption.
When the rain comes now, it has nowhere to go but down into
the drains and rivers, which are themselves clogged with garbage and sediment
because the upstream erosion never stops.
The Real Horror
The floods and landslides of late November 2025 weren’t a
natural disaster. Not really.
Oh, the cyclones were natural. The rain was natural.
But the disaster? That was us. That was human.
Decades of deforestation. Decades of treating forests like
ATM machines instead of living ecosystems. Decades of policies that prioritized
short-term profit over long-term survival.
Presidential Instruction No. 4 of 2005 was supposed to stop
illegal logging. It didn’t. The timber oligarchies made sure of that. Complex
licensing systems created loopholes big enough to drive logging trucks through.
Illegal gold mining along protected forest borders. Infrastructure projects in
sensitive areas. All of it driven by greed, enabled by corruption, tolerated by
a system that values capital over community.
At the local level, conservation efforts never kept pace
with destruction. Forests became instant cash sources in a reap-and-run
economy. Cut them down before someone else does. Sell the timber. Pocket the
money. Move on.
Government conservation programs exist on paper. They just
don’t have enough funding or enforcement to mean anything.
Meanwhile, post-disaster recovery costs billions of
rupiah—far more than prevention through sustained conservation would have cost.
Each time disaster strikes, everyone clears debris and
rebuilds. But the root causes—deforestation, land-use change, corruption,
greed—never get addressed. Not really. Not systematically.
And so the cycle continues.
The water will come again. The landslides will come again.
Because we’ve built our cities in bowls and stripped away
everything that could have saved us.
If that’s not horror, reader, I don’t know what is.
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The end is just the beginning of the next disaster. Count
on it.
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